Forget Me Not
by CelticX
Summary: Not all of the students at Lillian come from the very best of families. There is an old, grey stone building located behind the Chapel that is home for a few of those students. This is a story of one of those students. A different kind of Yumi/Sachiko fic
1. Chapter 1

Prologue

Lillian Academy is an elite, private, Catholic school for girls located in Musashino, Tokyo, Japan. It is considered to be one of the top three academic institutions for the children of the country's wealthiest and most politically well connected. Lillian is renowned for historically turning out ladies of education and culture that could mingle with the best of high society as well as successfully manage their own business, political, or professional careers. The school offers classes from kindergarten through university and is unique in that it is the only school in Japan whose high school division is run on the Soeur System.

The Soeur ("sister" in French) System provides a means by which older girls can take younger girls under their wings and teach them how to behave properly. It is the job of the older girl, or "grande soeur," to properly mentor and guide the younger girl, or "petite soeur," in such things as manners, etiquette, style, posture, speaking and grammar, ethics and morals. It is also the responsibility of the grande soeur to properly discipline her petite soeur when she gets out of hand or acts improperly. By this method the school has been able to do away with the strict rules and heavy discipline that most schools in Japan rely upon to keep the peace on a daily basis.

Petite soeurs are chosen by the older girls through the offer of their rosary in a brief but solemn ceremony where the grande soeur offers her rosary and, if accepted, places it around her new petite soeur's neck or wrist. Most such relationships are based on sisterly love between the two girls. Becoming a grande or petite soeur to another girl is not a mandatory requirement, but at any given time approximately eighty percent of the high school girls are in a soeur relationship.

While it is the general rule of thumb that the girls attending Lillian are of the rich and powerful variety, there is an old stone building at Lillian Academy, located behind the Chapel, that is home to the few students at the school that do not have homes of their own. At any given time there are between eight and ten students living in the twelve dorm rooms. Four rooms on the first floor are given over to the elementary aged girls that attend grade school at Lillian. The remaining eight rooms, located on the second floor, are for the middle and high school aged students. A common bathroom is located at the end of each of the four hallways which are shared by the inhabitants of the dorm. The first floor also contains a large eat-in kitchen and a common room for the girls to get together to talk, read, play, or sing along with the music produced by the ancient upright piano, assuming anyone currently living there can play the instrument. A large, two-story conservatory attached to the back of the dorm is accessed through the central common room. The conservatory houses hundreds of different varieties of dwarf trees, plants, and flowers along with the one construction that every student (and Sister) that has ever stayed in the dorm was woe to leave behind when they graduated: a heated, circular pool four meters in diameter.

The Catholic Sister that acts as the dorm mother also has a room on the first floor just inside the front door so that she can keep an eye on the comings and goings of her charges and their friends. The Sister chosen to this posting must be strict but loving considering that she is a surrogate mother to the students being raised there. The current dorm mother, Sister Agatha, is relatively young at the age of thirty-three, but is fully up to the task. She herself was the oldest in a family of ten, with seven brothers and sisters, so living with and guiding a large number of children between the ages of seven and eighteen is not new to her.

Sister Agatha has been in her current posting for the past five years, ever since Sister Bernadette retired at the age of seventy-five, and she dearly loves each and every one of the girls under her care. Watching as the older girls graduate and move on to college or careers brings both joy and sadness, just as it does with any parent whose child grows up and eventually leaves the nest. But there are always new students coming along to replace those that graduate.

All of the girls in her care are orphans taken in by the church. Funds from surviving family members that were unable for one reason or another to take care of the girls themselves help to offset the costs of classes, meals and housing, but not all of the children are so lucky as to have family outside of the school. The church sees that these particular children do not go without. They get new clothes each year and presents on their birthdays and at Christmas, but still it is often not enough to make up for the difference between those with families and those without. The children know and are usually very good about not treating a girl differently just because they do not have any living family, but as with all families arguments occur and words are said that can cut to the bone. The arguments are usually short, and the kids make up quickly, but the hurtful words, the reminder that they have no one else in the world to watch over them and care about them . . . those are not so easily forgotten and can leave deep scars.

Sister Agatha knows that she is not supposed to care more about one child over another, but she is human and there is one girl that both shines brighter and concerns her more than any of the others.

Even now, sitting at her desk with a cup of tea and taking a break from filling out the forms to record the food and supplies used during the previous week and preparing this week's requisitions to be submitted to the Office of Administration, she can just imagine the girl with her brown hair pulled up in pigtails and tied with ribbons, her mocha brown eyes scrunched up as she attends to the days homework, her soft, pretty lips pressed tightly together as she works through a particularly difficult math problem or English translation. She is a very cute first-year high school girl but by no means a classic beauty. She works hard every day to try to do her best to repay the kindness that the church has bestowed on her by allowing her to live in the dorms and attend classes here at Lillian.

Despite being one of the quietest girls in the dorm, Yumi Fukuzawa, with her shy smile and sweet, clear laugh, is probably one of the most popular; although she would never believe it if you tried to tell her. Although loved by everyone, she has a severe lack of self confidence and low self-esteem. All of the younger girls love her and look up to her, while the girls of her own age and older try their best to shield her from some of the worst of life's happenings. Even still, those hurtful words can and do occur on occasion, with devastating results for poor Yumi.

Sister Agatha sighed as she remembered one particular day in Yumi's first year of middle school when, after more than six years of weekly piano lessons, one of the older girls who was just having a bad day told Yumi that she played like a baboon. Yumi ran out of the common room crying and, even after the girl got on her knees and apologized profusely for her comments and told her that she loved her piano playing, Yumi had never touched the piano again. Yumi's skill on the piano had actually been quite high but that one, unthinking comment had so devastated the young girl that she had never played again. She wouldn't even join the rest of the girls when they got together for a music night. She just stayed in her room and did her homework or read one of the many books she borrowed from the school's library.

Sister Agatha received regular reports from Yumi's teachers on her school work and conduct in class, just as she did for all of the girls she was in charge of, and they were all proud of her grades. Yet each of them also wished that she would speak up more in class or, even more importantly, try to make some friends. Yumi never really interacted with her school mates except to allow them to borrow her notes or help them with a problem. She always sat alone in class to eat the lunch she made for herself each morning at the same time she made lunches for all of the other girls living at the dorm. She never went to the milk hall even though she was given a meal card to cover her food expenses. When asked why she said that she did not want to cost the school or the church any more than it already spent on her.

And that fit Yumi's personality perfectly. The sweet, charming, kind girl would bend over backwards to help anyone in need. She was always the first to volunteer for the worst jobs just so someone else did not have to do them. She both cooked and cleaned the dishes for all ten of her current charges, despite the fact that there was a daily rotation roster for the chores. Instead, Yumi would take the opportunity to teach the younger girls how to cook so that they would be able to take care of themselves once they were out on their own.

Yumi would spend the small allowance the church gave her each month on things for the dorm or small gifts for the younger children and never buy a thing for herself that was not absolutely necessary for living. Her one extravagant purchase had been when she saved up half her money for three years to buy herself a used laptop computer and printer so that she could type up her school reports rather than having to write them out longhand. The rationale she gave was that her handwriting was not decent enough for her teachers and she wanted to make sure that they could read her work easily. Sister Agatha knew for a fact that the computer contained no games, no music, no movies, and no pictures. It had an operating system, device drivers, and free, public domain word processing and spreadsheet applications. It did not even contain any software for email. Yumi said she had no one to exchange emails with anyway. She did have a web browser, but she only used it for research for her school work. Yumi may have known that "YouTube" existed, but she saw no reason to go to the site. It would just take away from her time for homework or her duties around the dorm.

Yumi of course kept her room clean and spotless. She also helped to keep the common areas of the dorm – kitchen, bathrooms, and common room – clean and frequently took the time to help the younger girls with their homework. The one duty she kept strictly for herself, and loved more than anything else, was to take care of the plants in the conservatory. She pruned and weeded, fed and watered the plants and trees, but her favorites were the flowers and, among those, especially the roses. Yumi would spend at least an hour each day in the conservatory caring for the various plants, usually as a way to wind down from the events and trials of the day before she started on her homework. It was too early for the girls to take baths or play in the pool so she typically had the fifteen-by-fifteen meter glass room to herself.

Sister Agatha often watched her from a small, round, verdigris colored wrought iron table and chairs almost hidden in one corner near the wall of the dark grey stone dorm. It was the only time she saw a totally unguarded Yumi. She could read every emotion on the young girl's face as she went about her efforts and it told the story of everything that had happened to her that day as Yumi thought about all that had occurred in school. She would be watering a plant only to suddenly laugh out loud, or be pruning a flower with a shy smile on her lips, or feeding one of the dwarf trees with frown lines creasing her forehead. And only here, when she thought she was alone and away from prying eyes, would she allow herself the luxury of crying her silent tears, her shoulders shaking with her quiet sobs. Sister Agatha often wanted to go to the girl and console her at those times, but it would be the worst thing she could do for it would take away this one, single place of solitude for the young girl. She would forever after always worry if she was truly alone in the indoor garden and never allow herself to give her emotions free rein again.

Sister Agatha sighed and once again put pencil to paper to start tallying up the kilos of rice used the previous week and to figure out how much more they needed to have the school's Purchasing Department procure for them to refill their larder. Maybe she could make some fruit tarts for desert tonight. Yumi loved her fruit tarts. Sister Agatha smiled to herself and pulled out her calculator and started adding everything up.

Chapter 1

Yumi glanced out the window of her room into the star filled night above Musashino. She held the sweet peach tart Sister Agatha had made for desert in her left hand while she twirled her pencil with her right; a nervous habit she had picked up somewhere. Homework had been fairly light tonight, so she was torn between reading the romance novel she had checked out of the Lillian Library earlier in the week or trying to read ahead in her History textbook. She was already two chapters ahead in History and had an A in the class, so the romance novel was a strong option. However, as usual when she had these rare opportunities, she instead took her fruit tart and headed for the kitchen where she made herself a cup of jasmine tea. She then walked through the empty common room, everyone else being upstairs doing their own homework she assumed, and entered the darkened conservatory. Without turning on the lights and using only the starlight to guide her, she turned right and wended her way through the narrow path between the foliage until she found the small wrought iron table and chairs. She set her teacup and tart on the table, sat down on the cushioned chair and leaned her head back with a deep sigh of contentment. The stars visible through the glass roof overhead were slightly paled by the lights of the small city, but they were still better than the four blank walls of her dorm room.

Yumi had A's in all of her other classes as well – English, Japanese, Math, and Religion – but it was only what she expected of herself; only what she thought she needed to do to help show her thanks to the church that cared for her and had raised her since she was seven years old. She even had an A in Art, and her paintings and sketches were praised by her teacher, but she never brought any home with her. It was bad enough that the teacher framed and hung some of them on the classroom wall where anyone could see them. There was no way Yumi was going to bring any back to her dorm room to possibly be ridiculed by her fellow students. That was why she never signed her work or allowed the teacher to say who had created the art that was displayed. That was Yumi's one condition for letting her teacher hang her artwork. Supposedly her teacher thought that she was especially good at portraits, but Yumi just couldn't agree. All of the portraits she had seen in the museums the school visited, or in the art books in the library, were so much better than hers, she thought.

The only picture she had in her room was a tiny, stamp-sized framed photo of herself when she was little, before her parents had died. She had no photos of her parents and only the one of herself. Taken back when she had shorter hair, she was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and was holding a baby rabbit at what looked like one of the petting zoos near Tokyo. You could just make out the Tokyo Tower in the background and that was the only reason she knew the general area of where the picture had been taken.

Yumi remembered nothing of her life before the day she arrived at Lillian. She had absolutely no memories of her parents; their faces, their voices, the touch of their hands, nothing. She wasn't even exactly sure how she had ended up here at the school. While it might have been frustrating at first, she had learned to do without those memories. Who her parents were, or had been, had no bearing on what she did from here on out. At least that was what she tried to tell herself.

Yumi sighed and took a bite of her tart before taking a sip of tea. She loved Sister Agatha's fruit tarts, especially since she made them so rarely. She wondered what the special occasion was this time. Despite trying to savor each bite, the tart was gone too quickly and Yumi had to be satisfied with just the mildly sweet tea. She knew she did not have a lot of time before someone came down to use the pool, so she lay her head back on the back of the chair and closed her eyes, just enjoying the fresh, clean aromas of the flowers surrounding her. The sound of a tiny waterfall she had built into one of the larger plant basins gurgled in the background, lulling her to slough off all of the tension that had built up during the day.

She must have been almost dozing off when she heard the door from the common room open. She started and scraped the chair across the slate floor before she could still herself.

"Yumi-san, are you in here?" she heard a voice call out to her in the darkened room.

"Over here Katsura-san," she replied softly, not wishing to disturb the quiet atmosphere in the room, "at the table."

Katsura Nazuka was in her class and was one of the few girls in the school that she might almost be willing to call a friend. _Does the fact that someone has never said anything negative about you constitute a good basis for friendship?_ she wondered.

"Why are you sitting here in the dark, Yumi-san?" Katsura asked as she slowly found her way to where Yumi sat. She pulled out the only other chair and joined her, putting her own cup of tea on the table after taking a quick sip.

"Look up and you will get your answer, Katsura-san," Yumi chuckled. The dark haired girl did as she was told and whistled in surprise.

"I can't believe all the stars you can see tonight," she said in an awed voice. "There are so many, I can't even find some of the constellations."

"Well, there is _tsuzumi boshi_, otherwise known as Orion," Yumi pointed at a grouping of stars, "you can just see the three stars of his belt. It's not quite as bright tonight, but you can still make it out."

"Your right as usual, Yumi-san," Katsura giggled, looking to where the brown eyed girl was pointing. "I can see why you like it here so much. It's quiet and peaceful, and the night sky is so beautiful, even when it's not always clear."

"Were you looking for me for any particular reason, Katsura-san," Yumi asked, somewhat piqued to have her alone time disrupted but not overly surprised.

"Oh, that's right, Sister Agatha wanted to make sure that you got one of the fruit tarts before they were all gone so she sent me to give you this one," Katsura-san said as she grinned and handed over a napkin-wrapped tart that she had been surreptitiously holding in her left hand.

Yumi smiled. Sister Agatha had herself handed Yumi a tart earlier so this was to make sure that Yumi got an extra helping. Now she knew what had prompted the good Sister to start baking. She must have been worrying about her again. Yumi thanked Katsura-san who, her duty done, was kind enough to leave Yumi to her solitude once more. She wondered if something in particular had started Sister Agatha worrying about her again or if this was a result of just her general concern. Either way she would have to make a concerted effort to ensure that the good Sister knew that Yumi was happy; or at least as happy as she ever was.

She slowly ate the second tart, wiping her fingers on the napkin and making sure that she had at least a sip of tea left to wash down the last bite. Sighing once more she pushed her chair back and stood up. She wandered the many pathways around the room, checking one last time on all of her babies, before she turned towards the kitchen to refill her teacup and head back upstairs to read one more chapter ahead in her History book.

* * *

><p>AN: As the summary says, this is a different kind of Yumi/Sachiko story. Still, I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to leave a review with your thoughts.

Take care.


	2. Chapter 2

"Shhh, here she comes," someone said from the door as they spied Yumi coming down the hallway towards their first-year Peach group classroom.

Katsura was in a panic. The leader of the clique of girls she had tried so hard and for so long to get accepted by, Asami Kamakura, had decided to play a nasty prank on "the quiet girl" in class by putting a lizard in her locker. Of course, the quiet girl in this case was Katsura's friend Yumi-san. What was she to do? If she squealed and told Yumi about the prank she would get thrown out of the group, but if she didn't she would end up hurting a girl that, not only did they live in the same dorm, but that she really liked. Yumi was too nice. She didn't deserve this kind of treatment just because she didn't fit in with "the crowd". Really, when it came down to it, Katsura knew she had only one choice if she wanted to be able to live with her conscience.

She started to walk towards the door where she could just barely see Yumi-san heading to class.

"Katsura-san," Asami said in a menacing voice, "if you warn her you will never again be able to hang out with us."

"Why would I want to hang around with a bunch of losers like you anyway," she said as she continued walking. "Just because your parents own the largest chain of grocery stores in Japan and everyone wants to toady up to you does not make you worth even one hair on that girl's head, Asami-san. This is just plain mean and I want no part of it."

"Your loss Katsura-san," Asami smirked, "you never would have been one of us anyway. You don't even _have_ a family to boast about."

"I beg to differ, Asami-san," she retorted. "I have a wonderful family of girls, each and every one of which support me to the best of their abilities every day and love me for who I am, not for who my parents are. Can you say the same thing? And the one person that would do just about anything for me is right there," she said, pointing at Yumi who was now standing in the doorway, looking on confusedly as Katsura-san was making her hasty departure. "Come on Yumi-san," she said as she grabbed the pigtailed girl's arm and turned her around, "we need to go to the faculty office and get an exterminator. Too bad they can't exterminate the two-legged vermin in the class."

"Ehhh?" Yumi squeaked as she was forcefully turned around and pushed down the hallway towards the faculty office. "Katsura-san, what is this about? Why do we need an exterminator?"

Katsura sighed and explained about the prank as they headed down the hall.

"Ah, you shouldn't have worried about me, Katsura-san," Yumi protested. "I know how much you wanted to be accepted by those girls. If all it took was a little squeal from me when a lizard jumped out of my locker, well, it's only a small price to pay."

"It's too high a price as far as I'm concerned," Katsura mumbled. "You deserve so much better, Yumi-chan. With all you do for everyone in that class, including most of those girls, you deserve an award; not to have some nasty prank pulled on you."

They reached the faculty office and Katsura explained to their homeroom teacher what had almost occurred. Of course, by the time they got back to the classroom the offending lizard had been extricated from the locker and promptly deposited out the first floor window to scurry off into the bushes so no evidence was available. Everyone denied that there was ever a lizard or anything else placed in Yumi's locker and the teacher had no choice but to let everyone off with a stern warning against playing pranks.

Yumi was not shocked by any of it. She had had pranks pulled on her since her first year in elementary school. No one had ever really been punished for them and it had become an accepted part of her school life. No, what really shocked her had been Katsura-san's actions. She had taken Yumi's side over that of the popular girls in the class; the same group of girls that she had so desperately wanted to be accepted by. No one had ever done something like that for Yumi and she was unsure of exactly how to react in this situation.

"I'm sorry, Yumi-chan," Katsura said from the seat in front of her. The dark haired girl turned around to look at her. "They should have been punished, but they had too much time to get rid of the evidence."

"Ah, i-it's not your fault, Katsura-san and . . . um . . . I-I want to say thank you for everything. Y-you didn't have to do that for me . . . b-but you did . . . and I want you to know how much I appreciate it . . . and . . . and," Yumi was almost in tears trying to somehow convey how thankful she was that someone, for probably the first time in her life, had thought of her first and not of themselves.

"It's alright, Yumi-chan," Katsura smiled, putting her hand on top of Yumi's where it lay on her desk and giving it a gentle squeeze. "You mean more to me than they ever will."

And that simple statement was enough to send Yumi over the edge. The tears started to fall in earnest and were quickly joined by sobs that started to choke her throat.

"Sensei, can I take Yumi-san to the infirmary, please?" Katsura called from her seat. At the teacher's concerned and knowing nod she took her friend by the hand and led her out of the room and down the hall once more, this time in the direction of the infirmary but actually only as far as the first stairwell before she pushed Yumi down into a sitting position on the stairs and sat down beside her.

"Yumi-chan, you are just too easy a mark. You spend too much time alone, you don't make any friends, and you don't join in any of the general conversations about boys, or movies, or idols, or whatever. So from now on you will be eating your lunch with me and I'm going to watch over you. Understand?"

"B-but," Yumi tried to say through her tears, "w-what about the others? If you hang around with me too much, you'll j-just get pushed away by them."

"If they don't see the good in you, Yumi-chan, then I don't want any part of them. That Asami-san acts so high and mighty just because of her parents. Well, almost everyone in this school's parents are just as important as her's are if not more so. I don't know what I ever saw in her and her little clique in the first place. She may be pretty, with that long wavy blonde hair and those blue eyes of hers, but it's probably just a dye job and tinted contacts." That comment got a chuckle out of Yumi as she had finally started to calm down.

"K-Katsura-san . . . um . . . I don't know if I am worthy enough, b-but . . . would . . . would you mind i-if I were to c-call you my f-f-f-friend," Yumi barely squeaked out.

Katsura smiled and took Yumi into her arms and gave her a hug, "Yumi-chan, I have never been anything _but_ your friend. And it would be a great honor to me if you considered me one of your friends."

"H-how a-about m-my only f-friend?" Yumi asked quietly.

"Yumi-chan, you have a lot more friends than you think," Katsura said with a smile.

Yumi just hugged her back and let the tears start to flow again, she was so happy.

_She had a friend; and she even called her 'Yumi-chan'!_

That afternoon, as the two girls stopped to pray in front of the stone statue of the Virgin Mary, or Maria-sama as she is affectionately called by all of the high school students as they routinely stopped to say their own prayers on their way to and from school, Yumi thanked the Madonna for providing her with a friend like Katsura-san and she promised to try to be worthy of the girl's friendship.

"Um, Katsura-san," Yumi asked shyly as the slender, brown eyed girl standing beside her finished her own prayers, "w-what do friends do?"

-oo-

"I swear that I will get my revenge on those two," Asami-san said vehemently as she stomped along the cobbled path followed closely behind by her two lieutenants, Haruka and Mariko.

"Well, Asami-sama, you did . . ." Haruka tried to say.

"I did what, Haruka?" Asami interrupted the girl. "Tried to pull a harmless little prank against a little nobody that is not fit to eat the leavings from my table?" she asked warming up to her tirade. "Hell, that little pissant should be thanking me for even acknowledging her existence! She is so far below me that she is not even worth my spitting on her! She and that Katsura too! They are both so low that if the school hadn't taken them in they would be wards of the state! Right now they would be sitting in some filthy public school and not dirtying up our precious Lillian!"

"I-if they are so beneath you, Asami-sama, and of course they are, then wouldn't it be better to simply ignore them?" Mariko tried to say.

"They accused me . . . ME . . . in front of my friends, and to a teacher no less! No Mariko, that is beyond acceptable! That is totally unforgivable and they must be punished!"

Haruka and Mariko just looked at each other behind their leader's back and shrugged. They both knew from experience that when Asami-sama was like this there was no talking to her.

Shimako Todou, the new Rosa Gigantea en Bouton since she had accepted the rosary of the current Rosa Gigantea, Sei Satou, simply listened to the ranting of the blonde girl as she walked a good twenty paces behind the three. In fact it was hard _not_ to hear the obstreperous student. Normally she would have simply ignored her, but she was talking about getting revenge on two young ladies that Shimako personally liked and admired.

Both Yumi-san and Katsura-san were orphans, brought up by the church and living in the school dorm. Both girls also made good grades, in fact Yumi-san's were at the top in the class, and were well liked by others. Even more so, Yumi-san had gone out of her way on more than one occasion to help Shimako and all of her other classmates when they had needed a helping hand. Shimako thought the world of Yumi and, if she had been a little more outgoing herself, would have long ago tried to befriend the sweet girl.

No, this was one situation that she could not ignore. She had been planning on going straight home since there was no formal meeting of the Yamayurikai, the school's student council of which, as Rosa Gigantea en Bouton, she was now a member. Instead she turned on her heel and started heading to the Rose Mansion, home of the Yamayurikai and, if she was in luck, the place where she would find her onee-sama, Sei.

-oo-

"And that's everything, onee-sama," Shimako said as she finished explaining the situation to her grande soeur.

Sei Satou, Rosa Gigantea and thus one of the three elected Roses that made up the Lillian Girl's Academy high school student council along with the Rosa Chinensis and Rosa Foetida, nodded her head from where she sat on the windowsill of one of the four windows in the meeting room on the second floor of the Rose Mansion before glancing up and giving Shimako a smile. She and Shimako had only been soeurs for a few short months, but she adored her petite soeur even though she often did not seem to show it. Shimako's steady, serene nature and calm, lovely smile provided her a peace that she rarely found in her daily life. Sei currently wore the mask of the school flirt and prankster, but it had not always been that way. Shimako seemed to understand the true "Sei" underneath the public façade. Even more importantly, at least to Sei, Shimako accepted her for who and what she was, both public and private, without any questions or reservations. She had become Sei's rock, and to see her rock tremble was something that Sei would _not_ allow.

"You were right to bring this to my attention Shimako-chan," she said. "I know the upstart first-year you are talking about and she has caused problems for more than one girl here since she entered high school. In fact, if I remember correctly she had issues even in middle school. I don't know this Katsura-chan or Yumi-chan that you are talking about, but I trust your judgment and if you say they are good people and not deserving of whatever it is this girl plans, then they are; simple as that," she said with a shrug as if it were self-evident. "You say that they are both orphans staying at the school dorm? Hmm, I wonder what Sister Agatha might have to say about this situation, although it sounds like going to anyone in authority would probably be the worst thing we could do for them right now. Well, Sister Agatha has never been one to stand on authority," she grinned.

"Well," the tall girl with short, shaggy blonde hair and piercing grey eyes said as she jumped down from her perch on the windowsill, "as members of the student council it is our responsibility to see to the well being of _all_ of the students here at Lillian. Personally, I think that also would include being sure to teach one Asami Kamakura-san exactly where she stands in the natural order of things, but I can't make that decision on my own. Or at least I shouldn't," she smirked, causing Shimako to giggle. She knew Sei well enough to know that if she wanted to teach Asami-san a lesson no amount of arguing from the other two Roses would make any difference to her. She would simply do it and take her lumps afterwards, assuming that she didn't end up being praised instead.

"You don't think they will try anything as soon as tomorrow or the next day do you Shimako-chan?" she asked her angelic petite soeur. Shimako had wavy dark blonde hair that shone in the sunlight and blue-grey eyes that sparkled when she was happy, which was most of the time. She was also so beautiful that she was often referred to as "the Angel of Lillian." Sei, on the other hand, while beautiful in her own right, often came across as more masculine than most of the girls on campus. The fact that she was an avowed lesbian and would flirt with anything in skirts, except for her petite soeur, simply added to her extreme reputation.

"No, I don't think they will try anything so soon after being publically accused, onee-sama," Shimako replied thoughtfully. "Everyone would know that that they were behind it and that would not be good for Asami-san's image. I think we have at least a few days if not a week before she will try to take her revenge."

"Good girl," Sei complimented her, "that is exactly what I was thinking as well. So we have some time to try to put the fear of Maria-sama into her and get her to back off. Or if not Maria-sama," Sei said with an evil grin, "then the next best thing; the fear of Ogasawara-sama."

"Oh my," Shimako giggled behind her hand, "onee-sama, are you sure you want to pull out the big guns this quickly?"

"Actually, from what you say about this Yumi-chan," Sei smiled, "I think it might not be a bad thing for her to meet our good Rosa Chinensis en Bouton."

"Oh, onee-sama, you really are wicked, aren't you," Shimako said with an answering grin.

"Only when I want to be, Shimako-chan," she smiled.

At that moment, across town at the Ogasawara estate, a certain raven haired beauty with sapphire blue eyes shivered as if someone had walked on her grave.

"Are you alright, Ojou-sama," her maid asked as she brushed Sachiko's waist length, blue-black hair.

"I'm fine, thank you very much," she replied off-handedly, wondering privately who it was that was speaking evil of her at that moment.

-oo-

The next day was Saturday, a short school day, and Yumi usually spent her afternoons in the Library working on next week's homework, studying for the next round of exams, or looking for books that she could take back to her dorm room for simple pleasure reading. She enjoyed romance novels, but she was also happy reading history books, biographies, fiction, horror, suspense, and action novels. While sci-fi and fantasy were not her favorite genres, even there she had some authors that she liked. She especially liked reading the stories by David Weber about Honor Harrington. Now _there_ was a strong woman that knew exactly what she wanted and how to go about getting it. And she loved the whole idea of the fiercely loyal and empathic treecats.

But this was also her first Saturday with having a friend, and she was unsure of what she should do. Should she ask Katsura-san if she wanted to go out for tea and a cake-set? She wasn't sure where she would go to get something like that. She actually wasn't even sure what it was, although she assumed it had something to do with cake. She had simply heard the phrase from some of her classmates. Or maybe she should invite her new friend to a movie? It was so frustrating at times like these when she didn't know what to do. Yumi was not really a social person so anything related to a social setting outside the dorm was beyond her experience.

She was so confused about the whole thing that she missed the call to stand and bow to the teacher at the end of class. Her chair scraped loudly as she quickly stood and bowed, causing a few girls to turn to look at her and giggle while Katsura-san gave her a concerned look. She sighed. Just what she needed – more drama!

As the girls were gathering their things and preparing to head home, Katsura turned around and asked, "Is everything alright, Yumi-chan?"

Yumi still could not get over the fact of being called 'Yumi-chan'. It warmed her heart like nothing had in such a long time.

"I-I'm fine, Katsura-san," she stammered and bent over to pick up her belongings, hoping to hide the blush she felt creeping up her neck. "D-did you want to walk home together or . . . or maybe go somewhere . . . f-for tea?"

"Ah, I'm sorry, Yumi-chan," Katsura apologized profusely. "I have club activities this afternoon. Can I please ask for a rain-check? Tea sounds wonderful, but I really have to go to this meeting today."

"That's right. Katsura-san is in the tennis club, right?" Yumi asked.

"That's right," the short haired girl grinned. "I want to get good enough to maybe turn professional when I get out of college. Well, probably not, since all of the great tennis players started out really young," she giggled, "but I at least want to be able to hold my own during the inter-school and regional tournaments."

"Are there any tournaments coming up soon, Katsura-san," Yumi asked, trying desperately to hide her disappointment. She probably didn't do a very good job of it since Katsura-san winced and apologized again, saying that the next tournament was two weeks away but would be held at another school.

"Oh, then you absolutely have to go to the meeting, and practice too," Yumi exclaimed, waving off the apology. "Um, if there is a tournament here at Lillian, would you mind if I came and cheered for you?"

"I'd love it, Yumi-chan! Thank you," Katsura said, taking and holding Yumi's hand for a moment before excusing herself and heading out to her tennis club meeting.

Yumi just stood there for a moment after waving good-bye to her friend, trying to realign her feelings and get back into her normal mode of . . . well, just back into her normal mode.

She was still trying when she heard her name being called, probably for the second or third time from the sound of the person's voice. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and turned to find Shimako-san looking at her with her usual, serene smile.

"Ah, I am sorry, Shimako-san, I was thinking about something else. Is there something that I can do for you?" she asked with a smile. Shimako was one of the few girls in class that Yumi had no problems getting along with. Even though she had become Rosa Gigantea en Bouton, Shimako was still the same down-to-earth and tranquil beauty she had always been. She and Yumi had spoken on a couple of occasions, usually with Shimako asking if she could help with some duty that Yumi had volunteered for. Yumi always thanked her kindly but said that she was fine doing it herself. The tasks Yumi usually volunteered for were not the ones that she would want Shimako-san to dirty herself with.

"Actually, Yumi-san, I was wondering if you had a few moments," Shimako asked her, "there is someone who wants to meet you."

"Someone who wants to meet _me_?" Yumi echoed incredulously. "Whoever would want to meet with me?"

"Ah, that would be me," she heard a strong, chuckling voice answer from the doorway to their classroom.

"R-Rosa Gigantea," Yumi stammered as the tall blonde seemed to simply suddenly appear in their doorway.

"You're right, Shimako-chan," Sei laughed, crossing her arms on her chest and leaning against the doorframe, "she does make some of the cutest faces. It's like her entire life is flowing past you on her features."

"Onee-sama!" Shimako squeaked in embarrassment. "I said no such thing. Please do not go putting words in my mouth. I simply said that Yumi-san had a . . . ah . . . very expressive face. I am very sorry, for my words and those of my onee-sama, Yumi-san," she apologized while trying not to giggle at the same time. Yumi thought it was very appealing. She certainly took no hurt from the girl's comments. She had been told since she was a child that anyone could know exactly what she was thinking simply by looking at her expressions.

"No apology is necessary, Shimako-san," Yumi said with a distinct blush, "You should never have to apologize for telling the truth."

"Amen to that sister," Sei-sama crowed. "I like this girl, Shimako-chan." Of course this comment simply caused Yumi to blush an even deeper shade of pink.

"W-what can I do for you, Rosa Gigantea?" Yumi stuttered.

"Let's take a walk, Yumi-chan," Sei grinned, taking the younger girl by the arm and guiding her down the hallway. "Have you ever been to the Rose Mansion?"

"Eeehh?" Yumi squeaked.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: I do not own MSGM or its characters. All such honors belong to Oyuki Konno. I do, however, claim all rights to the storyline (for what its worth).

* * *

><p>Sei-sama opened the door and led the way into the Rose Mansion.<p>

The Rose Mansion was an old building with white wood siding on the grounds of Lillian. It had once been a residence, either for the Academy Director or the resident priest, Yumi was not sure which. For many years now it had been the home of the Yamayurikai, the student council of Lillian's high school division. Yumi tried not to seem overawed as she was shown up the creaky old stairs towards the second floor where the meeting room had been installed by tearing down a wall between two bedrooms. A stained glass window at the top of the landing showed a beautiful representation of three roses: Red for the Rosa Chinensis, White for the Rosa Gigantea, and Yellow for the Rosa Foetida, the three elected members of the Yamayurikai.

Sei opened the door to the meeting room and Shimako waved Yumi ahead and then followed her through. Yumi heard a slight gasp to her left and glanced over to see an absolutely beautiful girl with long, raven blue-black hair and sapphire blue eyes glaring at her. This girl was the Rosa Chinensis en Bouton, the next Rosa Chinensis, the idol of Lillian Academy, the "Ice Princess", and the heir to the Ogasawara Zaibatsu all rolled into probably one of the most famous people at Lillian: Ogasawara Sachiko-sama. Yumi cringed slightly before bowing her head and beginning to apologize for her intrusion.

"Pay Sachiko-chan no mind, Yumi-chan," Sei-sama chuckled, "she seems to be in one of her moods again. Please, come in. Everyone, I would like to introduce you to Fukuzawa Yumi-san."

Yumi looked around the room for the first time, tearing her gaze away from one of the most beautiful girls she had ever seen, and realized that there were a number of other girls in the room, each and every one of them a beauty. She recognized Mizuno Youko-sama, the current Rosa Chinensis and Sachiko-sama's grande soeur; Torii Eriko-sama, the Rosa Foetida, and Hasekura Rei-sama, Eriko-sama's petite soeur and Rosa Foetida en Bouton. There was also another girl, very slim with long dark brown braids and narrow brown eyes that seemed to bore into you. The girl was introduced as Shimazu Yoshino-san, a first-year student like Yumi and both cousin and petite soeur to Rei-sama.

Yumi bowed deeply to the ladies in the room. "My name is Fukuzawa Yumi, first-year, Peach class, number 35. It is an honor to meet you all."

"Now, now, no need to be so formal here, Yumi-chan," Sei-sama chuckled, "we're all friends. No one is going to eat you."

"Um, yes, Rosa Gigantea," Yumi stammered nervously.

"Yumi-san, can I get you a cup of tea?" Shimako asked her as she was putting her book bag against one of the walls.

"Oh, please, allow me," Yumi said, "You don't have to serve me."

"You are our guest today," Shimako smiled at her, "please, have a seat and relax. Would you like green tea? We also have some Earl Grey if that is more to your liking."

"Uh, green tea is fine. Thank you very much Shimako-san," Yumi said quietly, still unsure why she was here in the first place.

"Please, sit down, Yumi-chan," Youko-sama said kindly, indicating the chair across the table from where she was sitting with Eriko-sama seated in the chair to her right.

Yumi sat with another thank you as Shimako placed a cup of hot green tea in front of her. She demurred at the question of whether she wanted sugar or honey as she took a sip to try to get her bearings, but it didn't help much.

"Is this your first time in the Rose Mansion, Yumi-chan?" Youko-sama asked her.

"Um, yes, Rosa Chinensis," Yumi replied, almost choking on her tea in her effort to respond promptly.

"What do you think of our little home," Eriko-sama asked, trying hard to make the young girl feel secure and probably failing miserably.

"It, it's beautiful," Yumi replied, still intimidated by the Roses surrounding her.

"Thank you, Yumi-chan," Sei-sama said with a grin. "I have always liked it. I especially like the new painting that Shimako-chan brought to us just this morning," she said, indicating a medium sized painting on the wall across from the door and directly in front of Yumi's chair. It was a relatively simple still-life of a blue and white Wedgewood vase of flowers sitting on a table partially covered with a cream colored lace cloth. A cream and white Wedgewood teacup and saucer, half filled with a red tinged black tea, was sitting on the table to the left of the vase along with a matching plate that held a flakey, golden croissant. Although simple in display, the detail shown in the teacup and plate, in the lace of the table cloth, and even in the vase itself, showed an amazing talent. But the best part of the painting was the flowers themselves. The exquisitely portrayed bouquet held greens, baby's breath, and three clusters of red, white, and yellow roses; just like the roses of the Yamayurikai.

"Yes, it's very nice," Yumi commented in a quiet voice after giving the painting only a brief glance.

"Shimako-chan borrowed it from the Art class," Sei commented nonchalantly with a smile. "Supposedly it was painted by one of the students, but I noticed that it was unsigned. You wouldn't happen to know who painted it now, would you Yumi-chan?" she asked with a glint in her eyes.

Yumi saw no way around it. Sei-sama was obviously already aware of who had painted the picture.

"Um, I did, Sei-sama," Yumi said again in a quiet voice.

"You did, Yumi-chan? I'm surprised," Sei exclaimed. "You have quite the talent there. I especially liked the little withered flower that you can just barely see towards the back of the bouquet," she said, walking over and pointing out the particular flower. It looked like the tiny, curled, brown flower might at one time have been a small, white Forget-Me-Not.

Shimako gasped when she saw the flower that she had not noticed before and then stared at Yumi as the brown haired girl hung her head. "Yumi-san, i-is that supposed to represent you?"

"I guess I was feeling a little depressed that day," Yumi explained, still looking at her lap, "I'll try to do better next time."

The silence in the room was palpable as all but one of the girls gaped at the young girl in their midst.

"Well, that aside, Yumi-chan," Sei said, turning from the picture and taking her usual seat on the sill of one of the windows as Shimako handed her a cup of coffee. "Shimako-chan tells me that you and your friend Katsura-chan are having a little bit of difficulty with one of the girls in your class; an Asami Kamakura if I remember the name correctly. Is this true?"

"Oh, it's nothing you need to trouble yourself with, Sei-sama," Yumi tried to quickly explain, her face clearly showing her slight panic. "It's just a little bullying. I'm used to it. You don't have to do anything for someone like me."

"What do you mean when you say 'someone like me', Yumi-chan," Youko asked in a kind voice, but a voice that her friends would easily recognize as one that would brook no arguments.

"Oh, I just mean that you don't need to worry about it, Youko-sama," Yumi stammered. "It's nothing, really."

"No, you aren't getting out of it that easily, Yumi-chan," Youko said a little more sternly although the smile never left her lips, her hazel eyes now the color of hardened steel despite the desperate look that Sei gave her. "What exactly did you mean when you said 'someone like me'? Please explain it to me so that I can understand."

Yumi had been through this before too many times with the school or church counselors that stopped by the dorm every few months. She could get through it one more time, but she hated seeing the pity she was sure would appear in their eyes. Well, it wasn't like she would have to deal with them any more after this anyway. Sure, Shimako-san would still be in her class, but she would probably avoid Yumi from now on.

"Well, I meant," Yumi said quietly, looking down again into her lap, "I mean, someone like me . . . a nobody. I'm no one. I'm here at Lillian because the church was kind enough to take me in when I was little," she said, finally looking up to see all of the faces of the people around the table staring at her. Yes, she was getting used to it. She gave in with a resigned sigh.

"I don't know anything about myself from before I arrived here at Lillian nine years ago. I don't know who my parents are; I don't even know if 'Yumi Fukuzawa' is my real name. I don't remember anything. From what I have been told, when they found me at a local church I was wearing just a bunch of rags. The doctors said that I was catatonic . . . and I have some scars, mostly little ones that look like cigarette burns and cuts, and . . . well, let's just say that I won't be staining any bed sheets on my wedding night, assuming that I can ever find someone willing to marry me. So, yes, a nobody. What else would you say about someone like me?"

"Excuse me," Sachiko said with a gulp as she got up and hurried from the room with a hand over her mouth.

"Eh, don't mind her. It's her time of the month," Sei-sama quipped, trying to stay somewhat businesslike after Youko had taken Yumi to a place that she had _not_ wanted to go yet. "Well, I'm not going to say I agree with you Yumi-chan. Anyway, Shimako-chan says your grades are the best in the class? Is that right?"

"I do alright," Yumi smiled shyly, happy to move on to any other subject. "I mean, it's the least I can do to show the school how much I appreciate the opportunity they've given me."

"And you live in the dorm behind the Chapel? Katsura-chan lives there too, right?"

"Yes," Yumi smiled again at the thought of her first real friend. "She lives in the room across the hall from mine. She helps me cook dinner sometimes, and helps me wash dishes as well some nights. She's really good about keeping her room clean too."

"So you cook dinner most nights for, what, ten girls?"

"Eleven if you count Sister Agatha. I'm not very good, but they seem to like it. That makes me happy," Yumi grinned at the tall blonde girl.

Sachiko returned to the room wiping her mouth and face with a wet towel. She apologized for her hasty departure as she took her seat once again.

The group spoke for another ten minutes or so, alternating questions between Sei, Youko, and Eriko about Yumi's life at the school and the prank that had been pulled on her before Sei had finally had enough and called a halt to the proceedings.

"Well, Yumi-chan, we won't keep you any longer," Sei grinned, standing up once again. "I just wanted to meet you and find out a little more about you since Shimako-chan here seems to like you. I would appreciate it if you would continue to take care of my little Shimako-chan," she chuckled, putting her arms around her petite soeur's shoulders.

"O-of course, Sei-sama. I like her too. She has always been very kind to me," Yumi offered sweetly.

"Thank you, Yumi-chan. I would really appreciate it."

"Well, if you don't need me anymore I'll be on my way," Yumi said as she stood up and walked over to the small sink to quickly wash and rinse out her teacup, "I'll just get my things and head back to the dorm." She did as she said and quickly gathered her book bag. She turned at the door and bowed low from her waist to the girls in the room. "Thank you all for having me today. It was a very great honor," she said as she backed out of the room and pulled the door closed behind her.

There was total silence in the room for the space of thirty seconds or more after they had heard the front door close before Sei once again opened her mouth.

"Did you notice? Not once did she say a single positive thing about herself. Shimako-chan tells me that she is first to volunteer for the worst jobs, she is always ready to help someone that needs a hand, she is kind to a fault, sweet, intelligent, she paints and sketches with real talent and, based on my sources, she was a wonder at the piano until a few years ago when someone criticized her with some ill-mannered remark . . .

"And, she thinks that she is lower than the dog shit that you accidentally track in on the bottom of your shoes. Have I summed it up about right, Youko . . . Eriko?" Sei asked.

"That poor girl," Youko said, shaking her head. "Sei, how did you find out so much about this girl?"

"Oh, I have my sources," Sei replied cryptically. "I've known the Art teacher for a few years and Shimako had once told me that she thought one of the girls in her class had painted this picture along with some others," she explained, once again pointing to the still-life on the wall.

"I would not hesitate to hang that in any one of my family's galleries," Sachiko said quietly with a shake of her head.

"As for the rest, I have also known Sister Agatha for about a year. She was more than willing to help if she thought it might help Yumi-chan. And, as you could see, her posture and her face tell you everything you need to know. Mostly I just read her body language and expressions."

"Sachiko, is there anything you can do about this girl, Kamakura-san?" Youko asked her petite soeur.

"Oh, I think I can take care of that little issue, onee-sama," Sachiko replied with an icy smile that would have severely frightened anyone outside of that room. "Her father may own the largest chain of grocery stores in the country, but they get most of their products from Ogasawara owned companies and farms. Consider that problem already resolved."

"Thank you Sachiko-chan," Sei said with real feeling and a catch in her voice as her shoulders slumped. "Listen, I've never asked anything of you all, but this one just . . . I . . . I just . . . ," she couldn't finish as she finally broke down from everything she had learned about Yumi within the last twenty-four hours. Shimako quickly stood and took her onee-sama into her arms and let her cry on her shoulder. She knew how hard it had been for Sei to play the role she did in today's interview of Yumi, and she knew how much it meant to her that her friends were willing to help this child. She patted Sei's back and let her cry, something she did only on very rare occasions and never in public. That is, not until today.

"We'll do whatever you need us to," Eriko answered her friend with a comforting smile. "That child deserves so much better."

Sachiko sat quietly while the others discussed Yumi and what they could possibly do to help her. She wasn't sure what else she could do after taking care of the Kamakura bitch, but she knew she had to do _something_.

Because when Yumi walked into the room Sachiko found herself looking at a girl that was the spitting image of her adopted brother, Yuuki!

-oo-

Yumi still wasn't sure what that whole thing had been about, but she shrugged it off and headed over to the library. New books were delivered on Saturdays and if she was lucky she might be able to find a book on Japanese history that she had not already read.

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><p>AN: As always, your comments and reviews are more than welcome.


	4. Chapter 4

Yumi stopped in front of the statue of Maria-sama the following Monday morning and bowed her head to pray.

_Thank you, Maria-sama, for the gift of my new friend Katsura-san. We spent most of the day yesterday laughing together as we cleaned our bathroom and she helped me make dinner for the rest of the girls and Sister Agatha. She even helped me clean up afterwards. We then spent a lovely hour sipping tea and eating some cookies that Sister Agatha baked for us. It was one of the best days of my life, being able to be with and share those things with Katsura-san. Anyway, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I promise to do everything I can to be worthy of her friendship. Amen._

"Yumi-chan," she heard as she finished her prayer and turned to head towards her classroom.

She turned back. "R-Rosa Chinensis en Bouton?" she squeaked. She knew someone had stopped next to her to pray, but she had had no idea who it was!

"Would you walk with me, Yumi-chan?" Sachiko asked with a smile.

"O-of course!" Yumi stammered, shocked to be stopped by the Princess of Lillian, let alone have her speak to her.

"I wanted to apologize for what we put you through on Saturday, Yumi-chan," Sachiko said with what seemed to be real sorrow. "It must have seemed like an inquisition, but I promise you, Sei-sama was only concerned for you and your friend Katsura-san."

"Th-there is no need to apologize, Sachiko-sama," Yumi tried to tell the blue eyed beauty. "I know that Sei-sama was just concerned with knowing what kind of girl her petite soeur was involved with."

"Again, I believe you have it wrong, Yumi-chan," Sachiko said with another kind smile, "Both Sei-sama and Shimako-san were truly concerned about what this girl Kamakura-san was possibly planning on doing to get revenge on you and Katsura-san. You know, as members of the Yamayurikai, we are pledged to ensuring the proper care and well being of the students here at Lillian. Since both you and Katsura-san are such students, it is our responsibility to ensure that you are provided with an academic atmosphere that is free from intimidation and conducive to the learning experience. Can you agree with me so far?"

"Um, yes, I guess I can see that," Yumi said thoughtfully. She had to agree with the logic in Sachiko-sama's statements.

"Good. Then you can understand that our concern is not just for you and Katsura-san, but for all students that might be exposed to Kamakura-san's intimidation tactics. I just wanted to let you know that neither you, nor Katsura-san, nor anyone else will have to worry about Kamakura-san again. I made a few discrete phone calls this weekend and, without mentioning any names, I made it quite clear that such an attitude as she has been displaying over the past year or so is totally unacceptable to the Yamayurikai and to me personally. I have been assured that she will no longer be troubling you or anyone else again."

"S-Sachiko-sama, I don't know what to say. I'm sure that Katsura-san and everyone else will be extremely grateful," Yumi said.

"And you, Yumi-chan?" Sachiko asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Ah, well, of course, I am very grateful as well. It will be nice not to have to worry about retaliation for the trouble we caused on Friday. Thank you very much for your help, Sachiko-sama," Yumi said quite formally with a bow.

"You are most welcome, Yumi-chan," Sachiko said with another smile as they arrived at the entrance to the education building. Sachiko said her good-byes and they split to go to their individual shoe lockers.

Yumi was surprised that Sachiko-sama had wanted to speak with her. She, more than anyone on the Yamayurikai, had seemed to have the most difficulty dealing with Yumi on Saturday. _Well, she probably just wanted me to let Katsura-san know the good news_, Yumi thought.

In fact, Kamakura-san was not in class either that day or the next, and when she showed up again on Wednesday she wore a distinctly different attitude. She was almost obsequious in her actions and speech with both the teachers and the other students. She did not go so far as to apologize to either Yumi or Katsura, but neither did she mark them out for special treatment. That in itself was enough for Yumi.

She and Katsura-san got into the habit of walking back to the dorm together each day that Katsura-san did not have club activities. Even more surprising to Yumi, Shimako-san, and even sometimes Sei-sama would walk with her as far as the turn to the Rose Mansion. They only ever discussed classes and homework, although Sei-sama asked Yumi if she could look at more of her artwork. Yumi tried to decline politely, but the Rosa Gigantea seemed to be set on seeing them. She even went so far as to start teasing Yumi and hugging her which always caused Yumi to squeak, so much so that Sei-sama started calling Yumi her "little dinosaur." It was all so different, she wasn't sure exactly how to handle it, but neither could she say that she didn't like the attention. It was actually kind of nice.

Shimako also set up a weekly study session with some of the students in Yumi's classes and then asked Yumi if she would be willing to help out. Of course, Yumi was thrilled to help in any way she could and essentially ended up teaching a supplemental class for the group the way they all looked to her for assistance. Shimako was always there to thank her and tell her how great it was that there was someone with the intelligence and capability to teach that they could rely on.

Even Youko-sama and Eriko-sama asked her if she could stop by the Rose Mansion and give them a hand in their Yamayurikai duties a couple of days a week. They always praised Yumi's efforts in everything that she did, even if it was just in making tea.

One day, a couple of months later, Yumi stopped again in front of the statue of Maria-sama to pray on her way back to the dorm, but she was almost too giddy to try. Sachiko-sama, who had seemed to take a special interest in Yumi and always seemed to want her by her side at the meetings, had actually asked her opinion about a certain issue the week before and, when Yumi had finally been forced to speak, it was Yumi's recommendation that they had acted upon. She was so happy at the time, but also somewhat afraid that it would be all her fault if it all went wrong. Yet it had all turned out great. Even the club president that had been involved told her that it was a wonderful idea and that she was going to recommend it to the other clubs.

Yumi was still so happy when she reached the dorm that she had gone into the common room and, for the first time in almost three years, had sat down at the ancient upright piano and played a couple of songs. She knew she was rusty, but even that didn't worry her as she skipped up to her room to change before going to take care of her precious plants in the conservatory.

Sister Agatha, who had been watching from the corridor when she saw Yumi arrive, was shocked at the change in her little girl. She knew she had to remember to thank Sei-chan the next time she saw her.

-oo-

"I'm sorry, Ojou-sama, but there is still nothing. We are trying our best," the man on the other end of Sachiko's cell phone said.

"I'm sure you are, and thank you for all your hard work. Please keep at it and let me know immediately if you find anything at all," she replied.

"Of course, Ojou-sama," he responded just before she hit the 'End' button.

It had been months and there was still no news. Sachiko was totally frustrated but could certainly not show that to any of her Yamayurikai friends as they sat around the table in the meeting room. Within days of meeting Yumi Fukuzawa she had hired a prestigious detective firm – one not already associated with her family – to do everything in their power to find out the history of this girl before she arrived at Lillian. She thought she had provided them with everything they needed, but it was still taking far too long. It was like Yumi simply appeared on earth the day she was dropped on the doorstep of a church just outside of Musashino by a person or people unknown. Her name came from a tag that had been sown into the collar of the torn and filthy jacket she had been wearing. The only thing she carried was a tiny photo of herself. It had been clutched so tightly in her hand that it took three doctors to gently pry it from her tiny fist even after she had been given a heavy sedative. Her fingers were so stiff one doctor sarcastically commented that it seemed as if they hadn't been moved in over a year.

It turned out that Yumi had glossed over the atrocities described in the medical reports from when she was first examined by the doctors. It was no wonder she continued to wear long sleeves and sweatpants in gym class even though the temperatures had warmed. The photos Sachiko had seen of the seven year old Yumi's emaciated body showed scars up and down her arms, all over her chest, stomach and back, her legs, even the soles of her feet. Both her vagina and her anus also showed evidence of multiple, repeated tears and scarring from the brutal rapes that she had had to endure. It seemed that no part of her body except her face had been spared. Some of the scars would have faded over time, but the simple quantity . . . looking over the photos had made her sick once again and she had cried herself to sleep on more nights than she could count.

And yet, having Yumi at her side in the Rose Mansion had seemed to bring her a greater peace than she had ever felt before. It wasn't just that Yumi seemed to want to do anything and everything for her that she could; Sachiko had servants that performed those types of duties for her every day. Nor was it that Yumi so obviously admired her and looked up to her. No, it was that Yumi seemed to truly enjoy being around her; and she enjoyed being around the sweet, kind, and caring Yumi.

Yumi still had problems speaking her mind and saying how she truly felt, and that could be extremely frustrating at times, but it came as no surprise to Sachiko. Yumi had spent so many years worrying only about others that thinking of herself was almost an alien concept to her. But she was slowly opening up, and the mind behind that adorable, expressive face was amazing. The solution she had come up with for the captain of the fencing club's budgetary issues had been nothing short of brilliant. She had heard that almost every club at the school was now implementing Yumi's recommendations, resulting in significant savings for all of them.

Still, she could sometimes see that Yumi's vision of who she was had not changed appreciably. Sachiko frequently noticed a particular expression on the young girl's face that showed she still thought of herself as less than a normal human being; unworthy of the accolades that were deservedly being showered upon her. Every member of the Yamayurikai, along with Sister Agatha and Katsura-san, was doing everything they could to bolster Yumi's confidence and self-esteem. They had made some progress, but nowhere near as much as they had hoped.

It was going to be a long process. Sachiko knew instinctively that whatever it was that had happened before Yumi arrived at Lillian was the key to saving the troubled girl's soul. The detective agency she had put on the case was one of the best in the business and they were still running into roadblocks and dead ends. She was just going to have to break down and tell them about Yuuki as well.

What she knew of Yuuki's past, once she really started thinking about it, wasn't much more than what she knew about Yumi's. Yuuki had been brought to the Ogasawara estate about ten years prior and she had been told that he was the son of a friend of her father's that had died. That had been enough for the seven year old Sachiko and she had never seen a need to learn any more than that.

No, the detectives would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but if it took adding Yuuki-kun's name and photo to their list of information then she would do it if it would save the girl that Sachiko had realized she was coming to love.

If she had offered her rosary to Yumi before this, if she had asked Yumi to become her petite soeur, Yumi would have immediately thought that it was being offered as an act of pity. That was something that Sachiko could never do. It would break the poor girl's heart and set her back so badly that she might never recover. Sachiko dearly wanted that girl to be by her side always. She just had to do it in such a way that Yumi would accept.

She decided that after the Yamayurikai meeting she would call the lead detective and request a meeting. She would tell them about Yuuki and see if that did anything to help in their search for Yumi's past.

-oo-

Providing what meager information Sachiko had on her adopted brother ended up being the key that the detectives needed to unlock the mystery of Yumi Fukuzawa's past. It turned out that when Sachiko's father, Tooru Ogasawara, was in college at Todai he met a young man by the name of Takahiro Aoki. The two became fast friends and stayed in touch even after Takahiro moved to the US to start a business as a government contractor. The Aokis frequently returned to Japan for vacations and to catch up with old friends, especially the Ogasawaras, and often took their children to the local sightseeing spots.

Then, one evening, Takahiro and his family became the victims of a home invasion where both parents were brutally murdered while their two children looked on. The children, a boy and a girl six years old, born less than a year apart, were separated by the invaders and the boy was thrown into a closet in one of the bedrooms. The boy heard his sister screaming and calling out his name even as he desperately pounded on the door to try to get free before he passed out from the terror and exhaustion. When he came to the next morning all he heard was silence. Finally daring to explore he found his parents still where their killers had left them, but there was no sign of his sister. He was able to make it to a neighbor's house before he collapsed.

The police investigated, but due to the delay in reporting, the trail had long gone cold. The Amber Alert issued as soon as it was known that the daughter was missing garnered no results. After almost a year of fruitless investigation it was determined that the killers had probably gotten away across the border. They hoped that the body of the little girl, or her bones, would eventually be found. Since crimes of this nature were fairly common in the area they lived the story in the local paper barely rated an inch or two of coverage.

Takahiro Aoki's will assigned guardianship of any surviving children to his good friend Tooru Ogasawara. Within two weeks of the murders, Yuuki Aoki was living at the Ogasawara estate outside of Tokyo, Japan. Within another month, he had been legally adopted and his name changed to Yuuki Ogasawara. Nothing was ever found regarding his missing sister.

Medical records from the Yumi Fukuzawa case were compared against those of Yuuki Aoki-Ogasawara. According to those records, the likelihood that Yumi was the missing Aoki daughter approached seventy percent. DNA extracted from the roots of hairs removed from the brush found in Yumi's dorm room by someone who would always remain nameless made up the final thirty percent. Yumi Fukuzawa had been born Yasumi Aoki.

The report and supporting documentation provided to Sachiko by the head of the detective agency at a small bistro near Lillian was as complete and professional as anything her father could have wished for if he knew about it. More importantly, it was sufficient for any government official to ensure that Yumi could be legally adopted by the Ogasawaras in accordance with her father's will.

The only question left to Sachiko was what to do with the information now that she had it!

-oo-

"Yumi-san," Shimako asked her after class one day, "would you like to walk together to the Rose Mansion?"

"Ah, not today Shimako-san," Yumi replied cheerfully, "Katsura-san and the rest of the tennis club are having a friendly, inter-school tennis match today and I promised I would come by and cheer for her."

"Oh, well, please give her my best and tell her that I will be rooting for her, Yumi-san," Shimako grinned.

"I will. I'll see you tomorrow, Shimako-san," Yumi called as the Angel of Lillian left the room with another smile and a wave.

Yumi cheered for her friend as she won two out of three of her tennis matches. Katsura-san waved and grinned at her with a bright smile. By the time the tournament was over the sun was setting and the lights had been turned on for the courts. Yumi decided to wait for Katsura-san so that the two of them could walk back to the dorm together. She took a seat on a small mound just outside the lights that illuminated the now empty tennis courts. She had been looking towards the small clubhouse building, expecting to see Katsura-san come out after her shower, when movement on the courts caught her eye. Katsura and another girl were walking out towards the center court. Yumi stayed quiet and just watched, holding her breath.

Katsura-san and the other girl stopped at center court right next to the net and faced each other. Yumi saw the other girl's mouth move as she took something out of her skirt pocket and then Katsura-san nodded. Katsura then bowed her head slightly as her sempai, Yumi now realized, put her rosary around Katsura-san's neck. It was the first time Yumi had ever seen a soeur ceremony and her eyes started to tear. She wasn't sure what she was feeling. She was very happy for Katsura-san, but for some reason her heart also hurt. She found herself having difficulty breathing as tears traced silent rivers down her cheeks.

Katsura-san and her new grande soeur embraced briefly before turning and heading back towards the clubhouse hand-in-hand. Yumi stood and, not knowing why, began running back towards the dorm, tears flowing from her eyes and sobs catching in her throat. Katsura-san was now a petite soeur. She had someone that she could be with, someone she could have fun with and learn from. She had a big sister.

Yumi had not been watching where she was running but found herself at the foot of the statue of Maria-sama. She collapsed sobbing behind one of the ornamental hedges and stared up at the serene face of the Madonna.

_Maria-sama . . . I . . . I should be happy for her . . . I _am_ happy for her . . . she has a big sister . . . an onee-sama. Then why . . . why . . . does my chest . . . hurt . . . so much? I . . . I have . . . a . . . family . . . already . . . don't I? All the girls . . . at the dorm . . . and Sister Agatha . . . aren't . . . aren't they . . . my family? Isn't . . . that enough . . . for me? For someone . . . like . . . me? Isn't that . . . all . . . I . . . can expect? For . . . someone . . . like me?_


	5. Chapter 5

I do not own MSGM or any of its characters. All such honors belong to Oyuki Konno.

* * *

><p>"So, Sachiko, did you go to see the school counselor regarding Yumi-chan as I suggested," Youko-sama asked over tea at a local bistro one afternoon.<p>

"Not yet, onee-sama," Sachiko replied after taking a sip of her tea. "I have not figured out how to approach the discussion without feeling like I am breeching Yumi's confidence or sounding like a stalker; and I'm worried that she might feel the need to contact the authorities immediately. I definitely do not want that. I agree with you that I cannot simply drop everything I have learned on Yumi without any thought. It could be devastating to her psyche and push her even further into the darkness. But she hasn't been to the Rose Mansion in over a week and I am getting worried."

"Shimako-chan is in her class; what does she have to say about Yumi-chan?" Youko asked as she cradled her teacup between her hands, looking over the rim at her despondent petite soeur.

"She says that Yumi is using studying for exams and getting dinner ready for the other girls as excuses to head straight back to the dorm after classes end."

Youko noticed with great interest her petite soeur's use of Yumi's name without an honorific. If she felt that much about the girl, enough to let her true feelings slip even just this small amount . . .

"Hmm, I wonder," she mumbled. "Sachiko, had you heard the news that Katsura-san has become the petite soeur of one of her sempai's in the tennis club? Yes? I wonder if that might have some bearing on the issue. Could it be that one of the very few people Yumi-chan could consider a friend no longer being as available to her as before has had some impact on her? No, no that can't be right. I know Shimako-chan sees her as a friend as well. I wonder if Yumi-chan sees her the same way? Oh, don't mind me, Sachiko," she said with a wave of her hand, "I'm just thinking aloud."

"I do not think that is it, onee-sama, or at least not all of it," Sachiko said thoughtfully. "Shimako-chan tells me that Yumi and Katsura-san are still close in class and the two leave together when Katsura-san does not have club duties. Yumi supposedly congratulated her and complimented Katsura-san on her new rosary. No, I think they are still close friends. Could it be something more regarding the soeur relationship itself?"

"Well," Youko asked, "what exactly is a soeur relationship, Sachiko? I mean, to us it is a relationship of both sisterhood as well as a kind of mentor-protégé arrangement; much like a real big sister/little sister relationship simply without the blood ties."

"Could it be that simple, onee-sama? I mean, would Katsura-chan gaining a big sister have that much of an effect on Yumi?"

"Mmm, maybe not; but what about taking it to the next level, at least as it might seem in Yumi's mind. Did Katsura-san really just gain a quasi-big sister, or did she maybe gain more?"

"You mean . . ."

"A family, Sachiko! A family," Youko explained, probably unnecessarily. "You really do need to go and talk to a counselor or someone in the profession. I may be a world-class meddler, but even I know when I am out of my depth and Yumi-chan's issues, especially now that we know about her true history, are well beyond anything I could ever begin to counsel you on."

Sachiko nodded, understanding what Youko-sama was saying. This had become much larger than either of them. The Ogasawaras had doctors of all stripes on retainer and ready to attend them at a moment's notice; but as with the detective agency, Sachiko did not want to use someone that already had ties to her family and would feel a need to report to her father. She was not ready to let her parents know about Yumi just yet. Her father would most likely just treat it like any other business deal and expect it to be done, no matter what the consequences to Yumi.

No . . . no she couldn't expect that type of reaction from her father. Despite his ruthlessness when it came to business he was more gentle and loving when it came to his family. He had never stinted with her, giving her almost anything she desired, but certainly putting limits on her just like any other parent would. He really was a true father. And he had been the same with Yuuki-kun.

Just as with Sachiko, he had always been loving, caring, and giving with Yuuki; treating the boy as if he really had been his own son from birth. Why would she think he would be any different if he found out that Yumi was Yuuki's sister? He would probably move heaven and earth to bring her into the family as quickly as possible. But was that what was needed? Would that be the right thing for Yumi? She was so fragile.

No, Sachiko couldn't take the chance. She loved Yumi too much to have anything go wrong. And she had been waiting long enough. It had been over a week since she had last seen Yumi. She had no idea what was going on in that pigtailed head, but she wasn't going to let that girl get away from her.

"Onee-sama, if you will please excuse me, I need to go check out some counselors," Sachiko said, gathering her things together.

"Of course, Sachiko. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help," Youko said with a smile. She loved it when Sachiko got serious.

-oo-

Yumi was enjoying a cup of green tea at her favorite table. Dinner was over, the dishes had all been washed, dried, and put away, the youngsters were in their rooms doing homework, and peace reigned among the plants and flowers of the conservatory. It was one of those rare nights when the lights of the city could not compete with the brightness of the stars. The lights were off once again so that Yumi could enjoy the night sky. She sighed in contentment.

At least she tried to.

Even with the spectacle of one of God's greatest achievements laid out before her she was unable to truly appreciate it. She was not unhappy, but . . . neither was she truly content.

She missed the girls of the Yamayurikai. She missed Shimako's sweet laugh. She missed the feel of Sei's arms as they wrapped around her trying to make her squeal. She missed Youko's quiet laugh and Eriko's sighs of boredom. She even missed Yoshino calling her cousin an idiot.

But more than anything else she missed Sachiko's smile when she looked at her. She missed the light in her eyes on those rare occasions when she giggled and the slight frown that would cross her lips when she was vexed about something. She even missed those times when Sachiko would get angry at her for thinking herself less than everyone else.

It was so much easier when she knew what her role was; when she knew exactly where she stood in the scheme of things. Even if that place was so much lower than Sachiko believed it should be.

It had been three weeks since she had gone back to the Rose Mansion. It had started out with Katsura-san becoming petite soeur to her sempai; with her friend gaining a sister. She had just not felt . . . worthy . . . of the girls of the Yamayurikai. She liked to think that she had been able to help them with their duties, but her downward spiral that had started that evening had just continued as normal until, ultimately, she remembered that she was still just Yumi Fukuzawa: used and abused girl with no past and no future to speak of.

She had to quickly wipe the tears from her eyes as she heard the door to the conservatory open.

"I'm over here Katsura-san," she called out, thinking it was her friend as usual. It was about the time when she could expect Katsura to come looking for her. She didn't bother watching her friend approach. She could hear the brush of a skirt against the leaves of the plants on either side of the narrow path.

"I'm sorry, Yumi, but I asked Katsura-san to give me a few minutes alone with you. I hope you do not mind."

"S-S-Sachiko-sama," Yumi squeaked, sitting up suddenly in her chair, "what are you doing here?"

"Isn't it alright for a person to want to stop by and visit with a friend?" Sachiko smiled.

"O-of course, b-b-but . . . "

"What? Do you not think of me as a friend?" she mock pouted.

"Um, well . . . "

"I assure you, Yumi, I consider you a friend of mine. Do you mind if I sit down?"

"Oh, um, yes, please," Yumi said, finally able to finish a sentence. She was so shocked to see the Rosa Chinensis en Bouton in her dorm that completing that sentence seemed like a major accomplishment right then. "Can I get you a cup of tea?"

"Thank you, Yumi, but I am fine," Sachiko grinned as she took a seat. "I just wanted to see how you were doing. You hadn't come by the Rose Mansion recently and I wanted to make sure you were alright . . . no, no, that is a lie," Sachiko sighed, a look coming over her features that Yumi had never seen before.

"I really came because . . . I missed you, Yumi," Sachiko said, looking at the younger girl. "I missed seeing you every day. Is that wrong of me?"

"N-no, Sachiko-sama, but . . . but why?" Yumi asked, sincerely confused now. "I mean, I'm still the same girl I was when I first met you. I'm still the same soiled girl with no past."

"First, I don't believe that you are 'soiled', Yumi. I know that you had a hard time before you came to Lillian. I know that you were sorely abused, but I do not believe that you were dirtied by that abuse. You were a child, with no ability to defend yourself. If a child is abused by their parents, or by another family member, or by a stranger . . . if they are subjected to physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, do we blame the child? Do we say that the child has been sullied by being subjected to such abuse? Do we paint the child as being less than human, or less worthy than someone else, simply because they were a victim of such abuse? Would you, Yumi, treat a child of such abuse as being a lesser being than anyone else because they had suffered that abuse? If one of the seven or eight year olds living in this dorm had been subjected to such abuse before they came here, would you look down on them and consider them unworthy of your friendship . . . of your love?"

"O-of course not, Sachiko-sama," Yumi exclaimed. "It is not the child's fault; it is the fault of the abuser. The child is, as you say, simply a victim of that abuse and they should be given all the love and support possible to help them through; to help them see that they can still become whoever and whatever they want to be!"

"Then why, Yumi, do you think that you are unworthy of receiving that same support, and caring, and . . . love that you would give to that seven or eight year old?" Sachiko asked, now standing and moving around the table so that she could kneel in front of Yumi and take her hands between her own. Yumi tried to complain but Sachiko overrode her. "You have said in the past that you are 'a nobody', a girl with no past, a girl abused. To quote your own words, you were 'no one.' Well, Yumi, I do not consider you 'no one.' In the short time I have known you I have seen how hard you work, not only at your duties, but to simply help others in need. I have seen how much you care for others without a single thought for yourself. I don't think you could be truly selfish if you wanted to, at least not if doing so would discomfit someone else. You are a kind, sweet, intelligent, and talented young lady. And you are cute beyond belief," Sachiko laughed, seeing that she seemed to be finally getting through to the brown eyed girl.

"And Yumi, I want you by my side. I truly missed you these past three weeks. Since you started coming to help, every time I entered the meeting room, it was your face that I first looked for, hoping that you would be there. I felt joy when I saw you, and I felt sad when you were not there. My spirits rose every time you arrived and I could see your face. And for these past weeks, I have felt so lonely without you sitting in that chair next to me, Yumi."

"I-I'm sorry, Sachiko-sama," Yumi said meekly, moving her hands between Sachiko's so that she could entwine her fingers with those of her sempai's. "I'm sorry that I made you worry. I just thought that . . . maybe . . . you would all be better off without me getting in the way."

"You were never in the way, Yumi. You helped us so much . . . you helped _me_ so much," Sachiko said softly. "I . . . I hope that . . . Yumi, I want you to please stay by my side. You can't know how much I missed you. I'm not sure that even _I_ know how much I missed you."

"I . . . I missed you too, Sachiko-sama," Yumi whispered.

"Yumi, will you please stay by my side in the future? Will you please keep me from being lonely? Will you please give me the joy that I have so come to cherish? Will you allow me to see your face, and your smile, every day?" Sachiko asked her. No, Yumi realized. She was not asking . . . she was begging! Sachiko Ogasawara was begging her, on her knees, to stay by her side. It was beyond belief, and suddenly Yumi could not stand to see Sachiko in such a position, certainly not while begging her for something that she could. . . and would . . . gladly give.

Yumi stood up and, by dint of their entwined hands, pulled Sachiko up to stand with her.

"S-Sachiko-sama," Yumi stammered, raising her eyes to look into the deep, sapphire blue eyes before her, "I don't know why, I don't know how, but I do know that I don't _ever_ want to see you on your knees ever again; certainly not to me. If promising to stay by your side will ensure that, then 'yes', I will stay by your side, and I will help you with whatever you need, even if it is just to make you a cup of tea, or to simply sit next to you, or to h-hold your hand," she stammered as she glanced at their still clasped hands.

Sachiko smiled at the girl in front of her and then disengaged her right hand from Yumi's but only to go searching in the pocket of her skirt.

"Then, Yumi, could I please ask you to do one more thing for me? Since you are going to be by my side from now on, could I please," she took the rosary from her pocket and held it up before Yumi's widening eyes, "could I please ask you to become my petite soeur?"

"B-b-but Sachiko-sama . . ." Yumi gasped.

"Or are you going to force me to get back down on my knees again," Sachiko grinned, knowing that she had cornered the poor child.

"Sachiko-sama," Yumi exclaimed, "that's not fair!"

"No one ever said I played fair, Yumi," Sachiko giggled.

"Humph," Yumi scowled and stamped her foot, but Sachiko could see the glistening of tears in the young girl's eyes.

"Please, Yumi," she whispered, allowing every iota of her desire to come through in her voice.

"Sachiko-sama," Yumi finally relented, her brief show of pique gone in the face of what was being offered to her and the look in the older girl's eyes, "I . . . I would be honored to become your petite soeur . . . if you would have me."

"Not only have you, Yumi," Sachiko smiled, gently cupping Yumi's cheek briefly to show the girl just how much she cared, "but want you and need you. I know we have not known each other long, but even still I have already come to love you as dearly as any sister could. It is I that would be honored to have you accept my rosary." She raised the rosary high, stretching out the necklace of beads, as Yumi bowed her head. Sachiko, with only a little fumbling trying to get it around Yumi's pigtails, gently lowered the rosary so that it settled around the shorter girl's neck and, when Yumi raised her tear filled but smiling face to hers, took her into an embrace that Yumi hesitatingly but lovingly returned.

Sachiko knew that this would simply be the first step in a very long road. From her discussions with the psychologists she had spoken to, she knew that the eventual counseling sessions would most likely be long and difficult; probably taking years. She also knew that she would have to tell Yumi about Yuuki, and sooner rather than later, but this was the first step on the road that she dearly hoped would end with Yumi becoming not only her petite soeur, but her sister in truth.

But on that evening, as the two girls held each other, neither one yet ready to let go, simply enjoying the warmth and love that they felt within the circle of each other's arms, and letting the tears of joy flow as they might, it was enough.


	6. Chapter 6

"Does anyone have an idea as to why Sachiko-sama asked all of us to meet here this afternoon?" Yoshino asked the room in general, hoping that one of the five other girls standing around in the meeting room of the Rose Mansion would have an answer. "Weren't we supposed to have the day off?"

"She did not say," Youko replied with a knowing smile, "but I might have an idea. However, I am not going to spoil her fun by guessing. You all will just have to wait to find out," she grinned.

"Humph!" Yoshino pouted, crossing her arms over her chest and scowling at Youko. Rei put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into a loose hug.

"It's alright, Yoshino-chan," Rei told her with a smile, "you won't have to wait too long."

"I just hate secrets," the shorter girl grumbled, "especially when they are being kept from _me_!" Her grande soeur patted her head in understanding, a small smile on her lips as she choked down her laughter at her cousin's pouting.

Indeed, it wasn't long before everyone heard the front door to the Rose Mansion open and close and the old, squeaky staircase began to sing its familiar tune as they could hear two sets of slippered feet ascending to the second level. Every eye was turned towards the biscuit door as the knob slowly turned and the door swung open to reveal an extremely happy Rosa Chinensis en Bouton. Sachiko walked into the room alone before she suddenly turned back after realizing that her partner had not followed her in.

"Come in, Yumi," she called gently with a soft smile as Yumi poked her head around the doorframe. Yumi almost seemed to be walking on eggshells as she slowly and quietly entered the room, her head a little down until she stood next to Sachiko. She then looked up with a shy smile at all of the other members of the Yamayurikai who were still waiting for Sachiko to explain why she had called them all together.

"Everyone," Sachiko said as she put her arm around Yumi's waist, "I would like to introduce to you my petite soeur, Fukuzawa Yumi-san," she continued as a blush of the prettiest pink arose in Yumi's cheeks at the sudden introduction. "Please be kind to her and help her to grow into the kind of Rose I know that she will one day be."

Even "ladies" can briefly lose it. Each of the girls gasped or squealed in delight as they all quickly surrounded the newest member of the Yamayurikai. Only Youko held herself somewhat aloof, allowing the others to congratulate Yumi first. Sachiko slipped away from Yumi's side and silently joined her grande soeur where she stood at the end of the table.

"I see that logic and begging did the trick," Youko said quietly with a grin of her own at the sight of joy battling with embarrassment that shown on Yumi's face as she became the center of attention.

"It did indeed, onee-sama," Sachiko replied just as softly with a smile on her lips that Youko loved to see.

"Have you figured out a way to start the real counseling sessions, Sachiko?"

"I spoke to a number of psychiatrists and psychologists and they all agreed that the best way would be through the use of a variant of regression hypnotherapy," the raven haired girl replied. "The method itself has taken quite a beating in the medical field because of its misuse to develop past lives for the patients as well as being susceptible to result in false memories, but in Yumi's case they all agree that there are probably some memories better left buried or revised. If they can pull out the good memories of her days with her parents and her brother, even if some of them end up being a bit hazy or even false, that will be better than leaving her as she is now."

Youko was nodding her head, running the various scenarios through her highly imaginative mind, trying to find any loopholes or problems and not coming up with any. It sounded like an almost perfect solution. "When do you think they will begin?"

"Yumi's next regular session with the school's counselor is two weeks from today," Sachiko answered, "I don't think it will be any problem getting Yumi to allow me to join her for her sessions. The school counselor is already on board with the idea even if she doesn't know the full story yet."

"And your parents? Yuuki-kun?" Youko whispered.

"Not yet, onee-sama," Sachiko sighed. "I want to go through at least one counseling session with Yumi before I tell my parents. By then I should know whether or not the hypnotherapy will be of any benefit."

"Everyone," Youko called out over the din still surrounding Yumi, effectively ending her clandestine discussion with her petite soeur, "I believe that there is some cake in the refrigerator downstairs. Why don't Yoshino and Shimako bring it up along with some plates and silverware and we can properly celebrate Yumi's joining our little group."

"Oh, I'll go get it," Yumi replied quickly.

"No, you are the guest of honor today," Shimako answered with a gentle smile, "please allow us to serve you this one time."

"That's right, Yumi-chan," Sei snorted. "I promise you that we will be working you to the bone quickly enough starting tomorrow."

Yumi offered a shy smile once again as everyone moved to take a seat, grab the cake from the kitchen, or make tea to go along with the sweet confection. Sachiko pulled out Yumi's normal chair and bade her to take a seat before sitting herself in her own chair. As soon as she sat Sachiko grabbed hold of Yumi's hand and entwined their fingers together.

"You have made me very happy, Yumi. Thank you," Sachiko said softly.

"I'm glad, o-onee-sama," Yumi stuttered, still trying to come to grips with the fact that she had a grande soeur. In order to make up for her stammer she gently squeezed Sachiko's hand. "I am very happy as well."

Shimako and Yoshino quickly returned and put a slice of cake in front of each chair. Shimako rightly guessed that Yumi would not want the largest slice and so gave her a small piece along with a bright smile that told Yumi just how much her classmate was thrilled to have her there. "We all missed you, Yumi-chan," she said gently, "thank you for coming back to us."

Yumi bowed her head shyly. "I'm sorry if I caused you to worry about me. I just . . ."

"The 'whys' do not matter, Yumi-chan," Youko said gently, "we are all just thankful that you have returned to us."

"Th-thank you, Rosa Chinensis," Yumi stuttered, her cheeks flushing.

-oo-

Yumi whimpered in her sleep, a tear slipping from her eye to trace slowly down her cheek and fall to her pillowcase.

She had had her regularly scheduled session with the school counselor earlier that afternoon, but instead of being alone with Ikeda-sensei, Sachiko had joined her. Yumi had been happy to sit with her and hold her hand as the counselor had introduced her to another doctor, a man by the name of Morioka-sensei. Unlike most of the doctors that the church sent to evaluate her every so often, he seemed very kindly and concerned for her. Most of the church doctors were only concerned with how she was coping with school and to make sure that she was maintaining her grades, but Morioka-sensei had seemed more concerned with her own well-being and state of mind. He had also asked her more about her past, about what she could or could not remember from the time before she arrived at Lillian.

"Honestly, sensei," Yumi fidgeted restlessly in her seat, "I don't really even remember most of my first-year here. I have a few, fractured memories of my room, and the dorm, especially the conservatory, but not much at all about my classes or classmates. And I cannot remember anything at all from before that time."

"That's alright, Yumi-san," the grey haired but balding doctor said with a smile, trying to make her feel better, "this isn't a test, so there are no right or wrong answers. This is just a bit of conversation since you are new to me and me to you. I've been asked to meet with you a little more frequently than before. We want to try to bring up some of those memories that have been locked away in your subconscious." He took out a silver pen from his breast pocket and started fiddling with it, much like a nervous habit, swinging it slowly back and forth. Yumi enjoyed the way the sunlight streaming in from the window played across the brightly shining pen.

"We may bring up some memories that you don't want to see, but we primarily want to see if there is any way that you can remember the fun and happy times with your family. You'd like that, wouldn't you Yumi-san, to remember the face and voice of your mother? You'd like to remember your father's laugh as he played with you, isn't that right?" he said softly, forcing her to focus on his words as her mind seemed to slip into a gentler place.

"Yes, Sensei," Yumi murmured sleepily. She didn't remember a lot after that except that she had an enjoyable talk with the kind doctor as Sachiko continued to hold her hand, her fingers entwined with her own, giving her a comforting squeeze every now and then as they spoke about things that were particularly painful.

Another tear tracked down her cheek to add to the spreading stain on her pillow as her whimpers increased and her breathing became short and rapid.

"No, please don't hurt mommy and daddy!" she cried out in English. "No . . . NO . . . NOOOOO! MOMMY!"

"Yumi-chan. Yumi-chan." Katsura-san said softly as she gently shook the sleeping girl.

Yumi's eyes flew open, seeing something other than her nearly bare dorm room as she screamed once again, "NOOOO!"

"Shhh, Yumi-chan, shhh; it's alright now," the brown eyed girl crooned as she took Yumi in her arms and rocked her. "It's just a bad dream," she said quietly as Yumi's eyes finally focused on her surroundings.

"K-Katsura-san?" Yumi gulped, "Wh-what are you doing here?"

"You were having a bad dream and crying out," Katsura replied, "are you alright now?"

"A bad dream? I can't remember anything! Ah, I'm so sorry if I disturbed and worried you, Katsura-san. I hope I didn't wake you," Yumi apologized profusely.

"That's alright, I was up getting a glass of water when I heard you crying out. I'm just glad that you're better now," she smiled. "Here, drink a bit of this," she ordered the young girl, placing the cold glass of water in her still shaking hands and helping to guide it to her lips.

Yumi took a sip of the cool liquid, wondering why her hands were shaking so badly. She really couldn't remember anything about a dream, good or bad, but to have disturbed Katsura-san made her feel just awful. She finished her sip, actually feeling a bit of relief as she felt her muscles loosen up and her hands stopped their constant shaking. "Thank you, Katsura-san," she murmured. "Again, I'm sorry that I disturbed you."

"It's fine, Yumi-chan. You didn't disturb me at all," her friend explained with a smile as she briefly stroked a hand over Yumi's hair. "But I didn't know that you knew English so well."

"English?" Yumi squeaked in surprise and confusion. "I've only just really started taking it within the last few years. I doubt that I could put together two proper sentences in English!"

"Hmm, well, let's not worry about it tonight," Katsura said softly, trying to keep the concern for her friend from her voice. "Lay down and try to go back to sleep. It's only just before midnight so you can still try to get a good night's sleep."

"I'll try," Yumi replied with a weak grin. "Thank you again, Katsura-san," she murmured as she lay down again and her friend tucked her in.

"Good night, Yumi-chan," Katsura said softly with a smile, placing a gentle hand on her head once more before standing. "Sweet dreams."

As she left the room, turning out the lights just before she closed the door, she prayed to Maria-sama that the remainder of her friend's night would be much more pleasant.

-oo-

"Actually, Ogasawara-sama, I'm quite pleased with just the little progress we made today," the rotund psychiatrist had said earlier that day with a calm smile as Ikeda-sensei handed the Rosa Chinensis en Bouton a cup of black tea. "No, the memories we tapped into were not the happy ones we had hoped for, but those were more recent and certainly more traumatic. I believe that we pushed those 'bad' memories back far enough that they shouldn't bother her, but unfortunately I can't promise anything. Now that we know that delving into her memories is possible we can work to avoid the harsher ones and try to go deeper and earlier in her memories to gather those that are more conducive to a healthy psyche."

"Of-of course, Morioka-sensei," Sachiko said while wiping a tear from her eye. She had never worked harder in her life than she had to hold herself together when Yumi had finally been released from her hypnotic state. Having to hold a smile on her face as if nothing had happened but a pleasant conversation, saying goodbye to Yumi after the young girl had walked her to the front gate, and then having to maintain her composure until she was able to secretly return to the counselor's office; she had never felt closer to breaking down than she had when she heard Ikeda-sensei's door click closed behind her.

By saying that the memories that Yumi had remembered were "not the happy ones" hoped for was an understatement of biblical proportions. How anyone could do such things to a six or seven year old child, and having to hear Yumi's screams of pain and terror before the doctor was able to bring her back away from that memory . . . If Sachiko had to live through those times and those memories, even second-hand, to ensure a healthy and happy Yumi than she would do so, but she also dearly hoped that was not necessary; and if it was, she prayed that something might be remembered to allow her to find and properly punish the perpetrators! The things she had in mind as "proper punishment" were probably things she should not mention to the good doctor for fear of having herself put away as a menace to society, but if anyone deserved divine retribution it was those scum!

"Do you really think we can help her, Morioka-sensei?" Sachiko asked with a touch of fear. "You've seen the psychological files that the school and church keep on Yumi. You have seen the medical files and the files gathered by my investigators. You . . . you heard her screams," she sobbed. "Can we really bring peace to her soul?"

"I believe that we can, Ogasawara-sama," he said quietly but with a conviction that gave Sachiko hope. "Yes, you heard her screams. Yes, she buried those memories long ago to save herself, but she is also a very strong young woman. I know that she has esteem and confidence issues, but you and your friends have already gone a long way to helping her in those areas. Please keep up your efforts and let me do what you hired me to do. I firmly believe that we will be able to help that poor young woman."

"I pray that you are right, sensei," Sachiko sighed.

-oo-

Sachiko approached the double doors to her father's study that evening with a trepidation she had never felt before. In her right hand, hugged tight against her hip, was the large file folder that contained every bit of information she had regarding one Yasumi Aoki, aka Yumi Fukuzawa. She still wasn't sure what her father's reaction was going to be or what he would want to do, but it had gone too far for her to turn back now. She kept telling herself that this was for her petite soeur. For Yumi!

She knocked briefly on the door before turning the knob and entering the plush study. A small round walnut conference table sat off to the right while a conversation area was to the left just in front of the large window overlooking the gardens and manicured back lawn of the estate. Her father's large walnut desk was directly across from the door. The entire back wall was filled from floor to ceiling with custom cabinets and bookshelves. Behind the huge desk sat her father, Ogasawara Tooru. At the moment he was smiling. Sachiko hoped that he would still be smiling after she had presented him with what she carried in her right hand.

"Otou-san, I was wondering if I might have a few moments of your time this evening?" Sachiko said with a slight nod of her head.

"I always have time for my daughter," Tooru with a grin, "but why such a serious look? You know that you can always talk to me about anything."

"I know that," Sachiko replied, allowing a smile to grace her lips as she felt herself relax a bit. "You have always made time for me, no matter what you might be doing or what business might conflict with my needs. You have always put your family first." She walked slowly into the room but stopped only half way before indicating the conversation area. "Might we talk a bit, Otou-san? I have something important that I need to discuss with you."

"Alright, Sachan," her father replied with another smile as he got up from behind his desk and moved towards the window, stopping along the way to pick up the silver tray containing a hot teapot and two cups from the corner of his desk. The conversation area had a western-style walnut coffee table flanked by a leather loveseat on one side and two leather chairs on the other. As Tooru settled on the loveseat and poured the tea Sachiko took one of the two chairs across from him. "Now, what was it you wanted to discuss, darling."

"It . . . it's about my petite soeur," Sachiko said quietly, her nervousness returning now that the moment was upon her.

"Ah, you mean little Yumi-chan. I know you've told us a tiny bit about her, but I was hoping to meet her before this," Tooru said with a grin as he sat back in the loveseat and took a sip of the hot Earl Grey. "You haven't even shown us a picture of her yet."

"That's . . . that's one of the things I wanted to discuss with you this evening, Otou-san," Sachiko said as she placed the folder on the table between them. "In that folder is everything that I know about Yumi, but . . . before you open it, I need to warn you that it won't be pretty. I also know that you will most likely be very cross with me once you have read everything in there, but I assure you that I do have my reasons. All I ask is that you please keep an open mind and don't jump to conclusions."

Tooru glanced briefly at the top of the unopened folder in front of him before returning his eyes to his beloved daughter. "I know you, Sachan. If you say that you have a good reason, then I will accept that," he said with a soft smile as he reached for the folder.

Sachiko picked up her own cup of tea and took a sip. She was tense again, but the die had been cast and she could now only wait for the results of her father's perusal of the evidence placed before him. Sachiko could easily follow along her father's reading of the various medical, police, and investigation reports simply by watching the features of his face.

The file was arranged in the same order as she had originally been presented with it, so the first pages were the police report of the child left on the doorstep of a local church. Next came the medical records of that seven year old child and the atrocities that had been perpetrated upon her tiny body. Her father winced when he began looking at the various photos and a tear escaped his eye on more than one occasion. He used his handkerchief to wipe away those tears as he continued to read in silence.

Next came the psychological reports written by the many psychiatrists and psychologists provided by the school and church over the next nine years of Yumi's life. She saw her father's knuckles whiten at one point and she knew that he was thinking about how the doctors seemed only concerned with her grades and the way she acted in class rather than in her overall mental health and welfare. Along with those reports were the written reports from her teachers as to her performance and overall demeanor and their recommendations for encouraging greater interaction with classmates. These reports were much more "Yumi-centric" and concerned with the child herself rather than the grades she was receiving.

There was a lengthy series of reports from Sister Bernadette regarding Yumi's behavior in the dorm, followed by similar reports from Sister Agatha. Both sisters praised Yumi heavily while still being concerned for her lack of self-esteem and frequent depressions.

Finally there were the reports that she herself had added to the folder. The first was the summary report from the private detective agency that she had hired and the revelation of Yumi's true identity. Sachiko was not surprised to see her father's eyes widen at the news that Yumi Fukuzawa, his daughter's petite soeur, was actually the missing daughter of his dearest departed friend and the sister of her own brother, Yuuki. The second report was written by Morioka-sensei and provided the results of Yumi's first session of regression hypnotherapy, the memories retrieved and then submerged again, and his starkly straightforward but somewhat promising prognosis.

Tooru gently closed the folder and set it back on the table between them. He picked up the cup of his now cold tea, downed it in a single swallow and then poured himself a fresh cup. Her father then leaned back against the cushions of the loveseat, taking off his reading glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Let's put aside for the moment that you kept this from me for any length of time, Sachan," he said slowly, his eyes still closed before he opened them to look at her. She was happy to see that there was no anger in those eyes, but only worry. "I would first like your own impression of Yumi . . . or Yasumi."

"Yumi, for now, Otou-san," she said with a sad smile. "It's the only name she knows and has known for the past nine years." She took a moment to gather her own thoughts before answering her father. "Yumi is the sweetest, most loving and caring girl you would ever want to meet. She is constantly thinking of others rather than of herself. As you read, she uses her allowance from the church only rarely on things for herself, but instead buys things for the dorm or for the other girls that reside there. She is especially fond of the young ones; helping them with their homework, holding and calming them when they are crying, teaching them how to cook and sew so that they can one day fend for themselves. She is almost more of a surrogate mother to them than Sister Agatha.

"Yet she still never sees herself as much more than a friend or sister to them. Despite the number of times she has been told otherwise, she continues to see herself as something less than everyone else. She has gotten better over the past months, and even more so in the two weeks since she became my petite soeur, but . . . Yumi is still so very fragile. One harsh word could easily send her into a deep depression for days or weeks at a time. She has begun making new friends, and the other members of the Yamayurikai treat her with extreme kindness knowing only what has happened to her since she arrived at Lillian. They love her dearly just as I do and go out of their way to make sure that she knows it; always finding ways to try to bolster Yumi's view of herself.

"If I had simply told her of her real past without any thought as soon as I found out about it she surely would have gone into another deep depression . . . or worse. We have seen it happen on at least one occasion so far and that was just because her one real friend in the dorm, Katsura-san, found herself a grande soeur. She stayed away from us for three weeks that time. It wasn't until I essentially forced her, through logic and literally begging on my knees, to become my petite soeur that she was able to rejoin us.

"The reason I didn't bring her to your attention and tell you of her real past before this was because, frankly, I was afraid that you might want to immediately bring her into the family. She's not ready for that yet. She still doesn't know anything about her past or the fact that she has or ever had a brother. If all of that were to be revealed to her without any preparation whatsoever . . ." Sachiko shrugged her shoulders to hide her shudder, unable to even contemplate what damage such an occurrence might do to Yumi's fragile state of mind.

"Well," her father said with another sigh, "I hate to admit it, but you're probably right. I would have tried to move heaven and earth to bring her home to us, and would probably have simply put her into the hospital or worse. You've chosen a decent man in Morioka-sensei. I prefer his partner for the normal needs of our corporate employees, but he's a good man and one of the best in regression hypnotherapy in the country. There is one man who is a little better, but he's down in Kyushu."

Sachiko could only gape at her father. "YOU KNEW!"

Tooru chuckled. He stood and went to a cabinet behind his desk, using a key to open one door and then his passcode to open the safe contained within. He returned to the loveseat, a smile on his face as he watched his daughter's eyes widen and her mouth drop open as he placed a folder similar to the one she had given him on the table.

"It's a small city, Sachan," he chuckled again. "My regular investigation firm called the firm you were using to see if they were available to be subcontractors on a corporate case. Your investigator's said that they were already on a case for the Ogasawara Group so my investigators talked to me. I wasn't too sure at first what it was that you were so interested in, but they eventually figured it out. Morioka-sensei's report is new to me, but most of the rest I already knew from my own investigation team."

"B-but then, why didn't you move to bring Yumi into the family already!"

"Because I decided to trust my daughter's instincts," he replied with a smile as he leaned over and took hold of her hand. "I knew that you had to have some reason for not telling me about Yumi-chan right away, and it looks like I was right. The one thing none of these reports could tell me," he said as he waved a hand at the two folders on the coffee table, "was about Yumi-chan herself. The only person who could do that was someone that had spoken with her directly, spent significant time with her, and knew her as a person and not as a report to be written. The only person that could do that was you Sachan," he said as he gave his daughter a kiss on her forehead.

"Th-thank you, Otou-san," Sachiko said softly with a gentle smile. "Thank you for thinking of Yumi and not just the situation."

"How could I not. If my daughter thought it was important enough to potentially have to withstand my wrath, and make Yumi-chan her own petite soeur, then I knew that she had to be pretty darn special."

"She is, Otou-san. She is very special," Sachiko said with a loving smile. "I already love her so much that it hurts every time I'm away from her."

Tooru gave her a crooked smile, a gleam in his eyes as he looked at her, his head tilted slightly to the side. It was the look he always gave her when he thought she had said something particularly interesting.

"Then you need to think about something else as well, Sachan," her father said as he squeezed her hand and gave her a grin. "Yumi is now sixteen years old. She may not want to be adopted this late in life. In just a few more years Yumi-chan will reach her majority. At that time she will be able to make her own choices as to her life. I would still like her to know about Yuuki-chi, and that she will always be welcome here if she ever wants to become a member of this family, but . . . what do you want?"

"Otou-san?" Sachiko asked in confusion.

"Do you want her to be your sister, or . . . do you want her to be something more?"


	7. Chapter 7

"_Do you want her to be your sister, or . . . do you want her to be something more?"_

Why did those words haunt Sachiko so much as she lay in her bed late that evening staring at her ceiling as moonlight shone through the lace-clad french doors to her private balcony. She wasn't a stupid girl; she knew exactly what her father was asking her. Her immediate reaction to his question had been to try to assure him that she wanted Yumi as her sister, but he had only smiled and told her to take her time and think about it carefully before she gave her answer. Her father could usually think four or five moves ahead of everyone else and see things that she could not, but could he really have read her heart better than she could herself?

Sachiko had known for years that Yuuki would become the next head of the Ogasawara family and take over the responsibilities of the Ogasawara Group's far flung business concerns. His coursework and the many friends he had made at Hanadera Academy, coupled with a sound education from Hanadera University and training at his father's side, would be all he needed to successfully see the household and business far into the future. The end results of which meant that Sachiko was free to make any match that would make her happy. She was not required to marry strictly for business purposes, but could find a true love match for herself.

She sighed heavily and decided that it was not a question that required an answer anytime soon, if it required one at all.

After her father's bewildering statement, Tooru had gone on to tell her that he would leave Yumi in her and Morioka-sensei's care, at least for the moment, but that she should not hesitate to call on him if she felt she needed any help or began to become overwhelmed. He had put full faith in her and she was determined to live up to his expectations. After all, Yumi's health and happiness depended on it. She knew that she had taken on this heavy responsibility willingly, but it still kept her awake much longer than normal. It did, however, help to know that she had her father to fall back on if necessary.

She turned over and closed her eyes to try to get some sleep. Tomorrow was going to be another long day.

-oo-

Despite best wishes and fervent prayers, Maria-sama was unable to grace Yumi with undisturbed nights of sleep. Katsura-san, living in the room across from Yumi's, was awakened by the young girl's screams three of the next six nights in a row. Each time the pigtailed girl would cry out various things in English. Katsura's grades were not as good as Yumi's, but even she knew the words for "Father" and "Mother."

After the third night of terror Katsura decided that she needed to speak with someone about Yumi's dreams. Sister Agatha listened closely to everything the young girl told her, getting every bit of detail that she could, before she went to speak with Ikeda-sensei. The school counselor then contacted both Sachiko and Morioka-sensei and called a meeting of the three to discuss this new and disturbing turn of events.

"I have to assume that even with just the two sessions we have had already, those old memories are trying to force their way back into Yumi's mind," the greying psychologist said sadly. "Similar to cracks spreading in a dyke as a result of one single hole, I believe that these memories will find their way out one way or another and the dyke will burst. We have to be prepared for that."

"But what can we do sensei?" Sachiko asked worriedly, shredding the tissue in her hands that she had needed for her first spate of tears at hearing of Yumi's nightmares.

"I'd suggest putting her in the hospital, but I don't think that will do us any good in Yumi-chan's case. She would only see it as a major step backwards and possibly undo all the good that she has gained over the past nine years."

"I agree," Ikeda-sensei said calmly. "Yumi-san has made tremendous progress since she first arrived at Lillian and even more over the past few months since she met Sachiko-sama and the other members of the Yamayurikai. I wish that we could successfully pull out more of the happy memories of her and her family to off-set the horrible memories that are finding their way out of her subconscious when she sleeps," she finished with a sigh.

"One of these days Yumi-chan is going to remember everything," Morioka-sensei told the others. "Probably sooner than we had hoped and most likely at the worst possible moment. That's why it would be nice to have her in a controlled setting, but if we can't do that . . ." he shut is mouth and began rubbing his chin, deep in thought.

"What . . . what if I temporarily moved into the dorm with Yumi," Sachiko ventured. "I could be in her room and even sleep with her if necessary to ensure that someone is there when these nightmares begin."

Morioka-sensei and Ikeda-sensei looked at each other, communicating silently in that manner that only doctors and twins seemed to be capable of, before Ikeda-sensei spoke.

"It is a possible solution, but what pretext could we use as an excuse."

"I could tell her that the estate is being renovated and that my parents are moving to the summer house to live," Sachiko suggested. "I won't be able to commute to Lillian from there," Sachiko continued slowly, thinking out loud about the excuse she could give to Yumi, "and ask if I could stay with her for a while. I could even try to get her to give me the invitation rather than asking her myself. That way she would be even more likely to accept the situation." Both doctors nodded in agreement that it seemed to be a workable solution, if only temporarily.

"We should also increase the number of sessions per week. I'd like to see her at least three times a week if that is possible," Morioka-sensei said. "The faster we can bring out those good memories to counteract the bad ones, the better. However, we need to be prepared to bring everything out at one time, the good _and_ the bad, and then deal with the consequences." Both of the women in the room nodded their heads in agreement, even if it was only reluctantly so in Sachiko's case.

"It sounds like we have a plan," Ikeda-sensei said with a tentative smile. "Let's put it into action. I'd like to get Sachiko-sama into Yumi's room before then end of the week if at all possible."

"I'll be sleeping with her by tomorrow tonight," Sachiko declared with certainty.

-oo-

"I'm sorry that it's not much, onee-sama," Yumi said with a blush of embarrassment as she showed Sachiko into her dorm room.

It hadn't even taken a full day to elicit Yumi's suggestion that Sachiko move in with her temporarily. Youko and her petite soeur had openly discussed the planned renovations to the estate house at the afternoon meeting of the Yamayurikai and the thoughtful and caring Yumi had immediately suggested that Sachiko live with her while the construction was being done. Explaining everything that was occurring to her parents, both Tooru and Sayako agreed that having their daughter move in temporarily with Yumi was a good idea, even if it was only a compromise solution. Tooru repeated his offer for her to come to him if she thought things were getting out of hand. Sachiko was grateful for his support and promised to contact him first if she needed any help.

"It is fine Yumi," Sachiko told her petite soeur with a smile as she looked around the almost bare room. "I appreciate your willingness to allow me to stay here with you."

"Oh, it's my pleasure, onee-sama," Yumi grinned. "I think it will be fun."

It was the first time Sachiko had been to Yumi's room and she was surprised at how little Yumi had of any personal items in view. There were no pictures on any of the walls, only a single wooden cross hanging from a simple nail above Yumi's bed. Nor were there any of the normal stuffed animals, knick knacks, or cute bedding that she would normally have associated with a young woman's room. The walls were a drab cream color, the furniture old but serviceable, and the bedding could at best be described as utilitarian although it was a nice shade of blue. From what she could tell the only personal touch in the room at all was a small, postage stamp sized framed photograph on the desk.

After putting her one suitcase down in a corner she walked over to the desk and, before picking up the small picture, looked to Yumi for permission. Yumi gave her a slight nod and a shy smile.

Looking at the photo it at first seemed to be a picture of Yumi at one of the petting zoos located around the Tokyo area. But a second glance made her realize that it was actually not Yumi in the photo, but instead it was her brother Yuuki. The fact that she could tell the near twins apart, even at such a young age, was a bit surprising to her, but Sachiko chalked it up to knowing the both of them so well now.

"That's the only picture of me I have of the time before I came to Lillian," Yumi explained quietly. "I'm not sure when it was taken, but it seems that I was happy at the time."

"It's a very nice picture, Yumi," Sachiko said with a smile, biting her tongue trying to keep her brother a secret for just a little bit longer. She prayed that it wouldn't be too much longer before she could finally introduce the two to each other. "I like the smile you have on your face. It really captures your joy."

"Um, would you like some tea?" Yumi asked with a slight blush of embarrassment touching her cheeks. "It's not as high a quality as the Yamayurikai normally drink, but it's alright."

"I would love some tea, Yumi," Sachiko said with a smile. "I'll even help if you will show me to the kitchen."

"You don't have to do that, onee-sama. I can make it," Yumi said quickly, her hands moving in a quick negating manner causing Sachiko to giggle. "You can take the time while I'm making the tea to unpack your things. I emptied the bottom two drawers of the dresser for your use and, of course, you can use the closet. It's pretty empty since I don't have much in the way of casual clothes."

"Then thank you, Yumi," Sachiko said with a grin as she moved towards her suitcase.

While Yumi went to make the tea, Sachiko began unpacking her things. The first items out of her suitcase were her two uniforms and a simple but well-made dress for casual wear. Opening the tiny closet door was a revelation. The only items hanging from the short rod other than Yumi's two Lillian uniforms were two white, button-down blouses, a pair of blue jeans, and a single pair of khaki pants. On the closet floor was one pair of worn tennis shoes with no brand marks whatsoever. She vowed at that moment that she would take Yumi shopping while she was staying with the girl.

The girls decided to take their tea to the wrought iron table in the conservatory.

"I did not get an opportunity to really appreciate this place the last time I was here," Sachiko said quietly, not wanting to disturb the peace of the flora filled room. "It's truly beautiful. You take care of all of these plants, Yumi?"

"Yes, onee-sama. It's one of the joys that I have," Yumi replied as she looked over the indoor garden. "I think that I have probably planted just about everything in here except for the dwarf trees over the past nine years; replacing those plants that have died along the way. I've also added a few touches here and there as well, like the little waterfall over there," she said as she pointed to the small, ornamental waterfall and brook located in one of the planting beds.

"You've done a splendid job, Yumi. It's very peaceful. It has almost a Zen-like feeling about it; as if it would be very easy to meditate amongst all the love you have given to these plants," Sachiko praised her as she took a sip of her green tea.

"Thank you, onee-sama," Yumi replied softly, still not very good at accepting compliments.

"I didn't even realize there was a pool here when I came by the first time. It adds a very nice and sweet humidity to the air, but is not overpowering."

"It's mostly used by the students to relax after they've finished their homework and taken their baths," Yumi explained with a smile. "The youngsters have a tendency to play a bit too much, but they don't go overboard to the point that they annoy the older students that simply want to enjoy the warm water and relax tired muscles and minds."

"Could we come back later, after we have finished our own baths? I would like to try it out if that's allowed," Sachiko asked with a grin. "I brought my swimsuit as you recommended."

"Of course, onee-sama," Yumi replied with a quick, bright smile. "Maybe it would help me to sleep," she went on as a small frown crossed her features. At Sachiko's look of interest she went on to explain. "I . . . I've been having nightmares it seems," Yumi said slowly. "I can't remember them when Katsura-san wakes me, but I guess it sounds like they're pretty awful. She says I've been screaming out during the night, so I guess I haven't been getting a really sound sleep for a week or more. I just hope that I don't disturb you tonight."

"I'm sure you won't, Yumi," Sachiko said as she leaned over and gently cupped Yumi's cheek. "I'm a bit difficult to wake up in the mornings since I have low blood pressure, and I usually sleep pretty soundly once I close my eyes," Sachiko explained gently as she ran her hands through Yumi's pigtails. "If you don't mind, I can hold you as you sleep. Maybe that will help with the nightmares."

"I-I think I'd like that, onee-sama," Yumi said with a shy smile.

The two girls enjoyed their tea in the conservatory, speaking softly of simple things, before stopping by the kitchen for refills. They then set about finishing their homework and taking their showers. It was a little unsettling for the rich and privileged girl to hear other girls walking around and talking as she was washing her body, but she eventually decided that it wasn't too much different than cleaning up after PE. It was almost 9:30 before they returned to the conservatory and the heated pool.

Yumi had insisted upon changing in the restroom while leaving Sachiko by herself to change into her bathing suit in the dorm room. Sachiko had said that the two could change together, but Yumi's cheeks and ears had burned a bright scarlet as she stammered her apologies and rushed from the room, her dark green school swimsuit and towels clutched tightly to her bosom. It was enough to pull a full throated laugh from the raven haired heiress.

"R-Rosa Chinensis en Bouton?" was whispered from numerous mouths as Sachiko and Yumi finally entered the conservatory. There were only five other girls in the pool; two older girls, including Katsura-san, and three youngsters whose mouths gaped open and closed as they took in the sight of the Red Rosebud in her demure but stunning black two-piece.

"Good evening, Rosa Chinensis en Bouton," Katsura-san called from her seat on the poolside.

"Good evening, Katsura-san. Good evening everyone," Sachiko said to the other bathers with a quick and inviting smile.

"G-good evening, Rosa Chinensis en Bouton," the others greeted her with awe.

"Thank you all for looking after my petite soeur."

"It's always been our pleasure to watch over Yumi-chan," Katsura replied with a grin. "Although it would probably be more truthfully said that she watches over us." There were plenty of heads nodding around the pool as everyone turned their eyes away from the taller girl to smile at their favorite dorm mate. "I hope that you are finding the dorm accommodations to your liking, Sachiko-sama," Katsura chuckled as she noticed Yumi's evident pride in her onee-sama.

"They are fine, Katsura-san, thank you for thinking of me."

"Just so you know, Yumi-chan snores," the first-year Peach class girl giggled.

"I-I do not snore!" Yumi exclaimed in defense of herself, as all the other girls laughed.

"I'll let you all know at breakfast tomorrow," Sachiko chuckled mischeviously.

The lively teasing and banter soon broke the ice and allowed everyone to go back to their usual play or relaxation even with the most famous member of the Yamayurikai in their midst. Sachiko would have to remember to thank Katsura-san later. Whoever it was from the tennis team that had snatched her up as their petite soeur was a lucky girl.

It had been fairly late when Yumi and Sachiko had joined everyone in the pool so it came as no surprise to find themselves alone after only a few minutes. Katsura-san's chivying of everyone to get ready for bed hadn't hurt either. She gave Sachiko a grin and a wink as she ushered the last of the youngsters from the room.

"This really is lovely, Yumi," Sachiko sighed as she rolled her shoulders to loosen the muscles from a long day of hard work and worry.

"Um, onee-sama, may I rub your shoulder's for you?" Yumi asked in a soft voice.

"Would you? You're fingers always seem to use just the right amount of pressure and find all of the best places. If you do, I promise that I'll do yours afterwards," Sachiko chuckled.

"Of course, onee-sama," Yumi grinned as her grande soeur turned her back towards her. Sachiko's hair had been pulled up in a bun high on the back of her head held together with two long, ornately carved chopsticks so as not to get it wet before bed. Yumi had pulled her hair up as well, but she had simply pulled the ends of her pigtails up higher on her head, wound the two into a bun and used a couple of bobby pins to keep it from falling. The expanse of nearly naked skin displayed before her, its owner begging for her to use her hands and fingers to touch and knead that skin and the muscles and tendons underneath, suddenly brought home to her just how beautiful and . . . sexy Sachiko-sama was.

It had become one of Yumi's favorite activities during the long Yamayurikai meetings to help Sachiko alleviate the tension by giving her a bit of a shoulder and neck massage. Sachiko had returned the favor a few times as well after noticing Yumi hitting her own shoulders trying to loosen up the tense muscles.

It was, however, the first time that Yumi had done this without a full layer of Lillian uniform between her fingers and Sachiko's porcelain-like skin. As she gently touched that bare skin, her fingers tingling from the least of contact, she became aware that there was simply no comparison between touching the fabric of the uniform and the softness and smoothness of Sachiko's skin. She likened it to kneading the softest silk as she ran her fingers and palms over the gently sloping shoulders and the narrow nape of Sachiko's graceful neck.

Before, giving Sachiko a massage had simply been a way to assist her friend, and now onee-sama, and to show how much she cared for her. There had been no other thoughts or feelings that would have brought to her the possible ramifications of what she was doing. Yumi was not unknowledgeable of the ways of love between a man and a woman . . . or between two women. She had read the books. She had been through the health classes taught by the school. She knew that there were certain things that people could do for each other that could be seen as either totally innocent or as the prelude to a deeper, more meaningful physical relationship. It had simply never crossed her mind, until tonight, that a simple shoulder massage could be one of those things.

But she had promised, so she would not back down now. Yumi was, however, extremely glad that Sachiko-sama's head was turned away from her so that she could not see the pink quickly rising in her cheeks.

Sachiko, for her part, had expected the feel of Yumi's hands to be nothing more than what she had felt many times before. She had _not_ expected the electric sensations that shot through her at those first, tentative stokes along the tops of her shoulders and her neck. She had certainly not expected the heat that arose in her abdomen as those tentative touches slowly became more assured, more powerful and more . . . sensual. She grasped her hands together tightly under the water, her fingers entwined and squeezing almost painfully to try to override the feeling of pure pleasure that was running through her body as Yumi stroked and kneaded her tired muscles.

A low moan somehow escaped her lips and she almost froze until she heard Yumi's chuckles. The younger girl didn't make any comments, but Sachiko could just imagine the smile on the other girl's lips as she heard the evidence that her ministrations were surely calming and relaxing her onee-sama. Oh, how wrong she was! If anything Sachiko was getting more tense, more unnerved as Yumi continued her massage, moving slowly further down her back to her shoulder blades and then back up to her neck. Sachiko almost allowed another sound to escape before she tightly sealed her lips as she felt her core begin to flare with heat.

"_Do you want her to be your sister, or . . . do you want her to be something more?"_

Sachiko quickly stomped on those thoughts as they arose unbidden in her mind. "Dirty old man," she mumbled under her breath, too low for Yumi to hear over the lapping of the water in the pool. But she couldn't ignore the feelings inside her, the pleasure that Yumi's hands were providing and the resultant desire that was growing quickly in her loins.

Sachiko slipped out from under those extremely talented fingers and slid away before she further embarrassed herself.

"Onee-sama?" Yumi asked in confusion as her grande soeur moved away from her.

"Um, I think that's enough for now," Sachiko breathed heavily, willing the heat in her face and . . . elsewhere . . . to subside before she turned around to face her petite soeur with a smile. "Now it's my turn," she grinned. Yumi just returned her smile and turned around to provide her own back to Sachiko. Just as the older girl approached, Yumi lifted her hands and pulled the straps of her school swimsuit slightly down her arms to expose her shoulders fully. Sachiko's breath caught in her throat at the sight of all that skin even knowing that Yumi was innocently trying to make it easier for her.

But that exposure also reminded Sachiko of Yumi's dark past, for there was a multitude of small scars riddling that expanse of bare skin. Yumi had wrapped one towel around her shoulders and another around her waist, allowing it to cover most of her legs, from the time she left the bathroom on the second floor until she quickly slipped into the water of the pool, dipping down so that it flowed up to her neck. The brown eyed girl had not raised herself any higher until everyone else had left. Now, even knowing what had been done to her, the actual sight of the scarring was shocking.

"Onee-sama?" Yumi asked quietly when Sachiko had not immediately begun her own massage. "Is everything alright?"

"Of course, Yumi. I was just . . . tightening the string to my top."

"Oh."

Sachiko reached out and grasped Yumi's shoulders with assurance, beginning to massage them immediately so as not to give away that she had been surprised by the scars. She could barely feel them under her fingers and palms. Only the slightly whiter tone to Yumi's skin gave evidence of the violence done to her when she was young. If anything could put a damper on her unladylike sexual desires, that sight did it.

And that shamed her even more than the earlier feelings of arousal. She had known of those scars already. She knew where they were all over Yumi's body. She thought she had accepted them as simply another part of the girl she had so come to love. Obviously she had been wrong.

She held her breath a bit as she continued to massage Yumi's neck, shoulders, and upper back, trying desperately not to allow the tears and sobs building up in her chest to escape. It took a few minutes but she was finally able to bring her emotions under control, Yumi totally unaware of the tremendous battle that had been waged behind her.

Yumi was not unaware of the scars that her grande soeurs hands were now covering with wonderfully feeling strokes of pressure. She knew that they must have come as somewhat of a shock for Sachiko, and she was proud of the older girl for not saying anything or recoiling in horror. She had told them all of the beatings, rapes, and torture that she had supposedly endured before she arrived at Lillian. She had never, however, gone so far as to show them any of the evidence of those atrocities that adorned her body. Those on her shoulders and arms were smaller and even fainter than those on her legs and torso. Still, she continued to wear long sleeves so as not to subject others to the sight as well as to keep them from becoming even more obvious on lightly tanned skin.

Yumi closed her eyes, forgetting everything but the feelings of gentle pleasure and relaxation that flowed through her body. She felt the same heat burning in her abdomen and core that Sachiko had felt, but she had no experience to understand what those feelings were or meant. To her they were simply a few of many of the manifestations of the overall pleasure coming from Sachiko's tender massage. She didn't even make an attempt to withhold the moans and whimpers that flew from her lips.

"It feels wonderful, onee-sama," she said quietly into the stillness of the night.

"I-I'm glad, Yumi," Sachiko murmured. "I enjoy making you feel good."

"Then that's something else we have in common," Yumi giggled.

"Yes. Yes it is, Yumi," Sachiko smiled, wondering if it really was the same for Yumi as it was for her. Learning how nice it was to receive pleasure from Yumi was something of a shock. Learning how nice it was to _give_ pleasure to Yumi, the feelings that arose in her heart, was something else again.

_Maybe the old man knew more than I thought he did_, Sachiko thought to herself with an odd grin.

-oo-

The girls took another brief shower to rinse off before donning their sleepwear for the evening; a set of silk pajamas of deep blue for Sachiko and an almost puritanical flannel nightgown for Yumi. It had been decided that Sachiko would sleep with her back against the wall while Yumi would sleep on the other side facing the open room.

As they settled themselves on the thin mattress it felt only right and natural for the slightly taller girl to put her arm around the smaller girl's waist and pull her tight, spooning her so that they touched all along her front. Yumi's body felt like it fit perfectly within the scope of her own. Their knees met at the perfect angle just as did their hips. Moreover, it felt comfortable and safe to be holding her petite soeur – no, her sister she tried to tell herself – in such a manner and it brought a smile to her lips.

"Good night, Yumi," she whispered tenderly.

"Good night, onee-sama," she heard Yumi whisper back. She could hear the answering smile in Yumi's voice and it warmed her more than anything else could as she closed her eyes.

Sachiko thought she knew about what to expect if the nightmares started up, but the reality was much worse than she could ever have imagined.

It started as a tiny, quiet whimpering around one in the morning. Sachiko, who had tried her best to sleep lightly, awoke almost instantly at the near silent mewling, but those minute sounds quickly escalated to moans and murmurs in English that were too low for Sachiko to hear, let alone understand.

"Yumi, Yumi," Sachiko said quietly, shaking the girl to try to wake her.

"No, no don't," Yumi murmured in English that the raven haired girl easily understood. She had been tutored since elementary school in conversational English so what Yumi was saying was easily translatable.

"Yumi, please wake up, Yumi," Sachiko said more loudly, shaking the brown eyed girl's shoulder even harder.

NO! NO! Don't hurt Mommy and Daddy!" she wailed softly, unable to break out of the deadly cycle of violence that had been plaguing her nightly for the past week and more. "NOOOOO!" she screeched and flinched, covering her ears as if having heard a loud, sharp noise. "MOMMMMY!"

"YUMI!" Sachiko yelled to no avail as she turned the terrorized girl over onto her back and shook both shoulders.

"YUUUKIIIII! PLEASE HELP ME!" Yumi suddenly screamed before her entire body tensed and froze. Sachiko was afraid that she was having a seizure until the younger girl suddenly relaxed and her eyes fluttered open. "O-Onee-sama?" Yumi asked in a soft, timid, and fearful voice.

"Oh, Yumi," Sachiko sobbed.

"Did I have another nightmare, onee-sama?"

"Yes, Yumi. Yes, you did, but it's alright now," Sachiko said gently, wiping her eyes to calm herself and pulling her sister into a tight embrace. "It's alright now. You're alright."

"I can't remember any of it. I'm sorry that I woke you, onee-sama," Yumi pouted, a tear in her eye for having disturbed her grande soeur's sleep.

"It's alright, Yumi. I wasn't really asleep yet anyway. I was still thinking about some things for the meeting tomorrow. Why don't we try again to get some sleep? Maybe this time we will both have a little better success," she smiled.

"Oh, um, yeah. Ok," Yumi agreed with another small smile.

The two girls resituated themselves on the narrow bed and it was only moments before Yumi fell into a deep sleep, a soft snore like the buzzing of bees barely escaping her slightly parted lips.

Sachiko, on the other hand, now had much to think about and would spend half the night wondering and worrying about her dear petite soeur. All she was able to accomplish, however, was to make one single decision.

"This cannot continue. We must do something."


	8. Chapter 8

Yumi was her usual bright and chipper self early the next morning as she and Sachiko got ready for school. The Rosa Chinensis en Bouton found the hustle and bustle of the dorm quite interesting and fun to watch as all the girls ran hither and yon between their rooms, the common bathrooms, and the kitchen. She and Yumi had gotten up earlier than most of the others so that Yumi could start making breakfast for everyone, but seeing that many girls all focused on getting ready for school was a new and exciting experience for the only child of one of the wealthiest families in all of Japan. The youngsters were the most fun to watch as they flipped between earnestly getting ready and playing with each other and the older girls.

Katsura-san helped Yumi in preparing the simple but filling breakfast of rice porridge with brown sugar, toast with jam, and fresh fruits and juices, laughing all the while at the antics surrounding her. Sister Agatha did what she could to contain the younger girl's enthusiasm, making sure that they had their book bags properly prepared and that their uniforms were in order. She also kept a ladle in her hand to smack the wrists of those girls that seemed to be getting a little greedy with the food, ensuring that everyone had plenty to eat at the start of the day.

All in all it was a boisterous but well-tuned chaos that kept Sachiko brightly entertained.

But underneath her smiles and laughter was a deep, unending worry for her dear little sister.

"Yumi," she asked quietly as the two finally sat down to their own meals after Yumi had finished fixing everyone's lunches, "would you like to do a little bit of shopping after the session this afternoon?"

"I'd love to, onee-sama," Yumi exclaimed with real glee. "I don't have much money until the first of the month, but I've been wanting to look for a few things for the children."

"That's fine," Sachiko chuckled, "as long as you don't mind if I purchase a few things for you. I noticed that you needed a bit more in the way of casual clothes. Remember, the summer break is coming up. I'd like to take you a few places and you can't wear your uniform all the time. Also, we will have meetings with Hanadera Boy's Academy, both on campus and off, and you will want at least another outfit or two for those meetings."

"Um," Yumi mumbled as she played with the food on her plate, embarrassed for the first time in her life at her lack of clothes and funds, "I guess I don't mind. I want to look my best for you . . . but you have to promise me that they won't be too expensive," she stated flatly. "I don't want you spending your money on me for things that I can get myself . . . eventually."

"I want to do this for you, Yumi," Sachiko smiled at her petite soeur, "please let me pamper you a bit."

"Alright, onee-sama," Yumi replied with a sigh and a small, shy smile.

-oo-

Sachiko waited until Yumi was completely in her hypnotic trance before she described to the counselors the early morning's nightmarish episode.

"It seems that the little hole we drilled into the dyke has been spawning more and more cracks," Morioka-sensei said worriedly as he rubbed his chin. "We have been able to rescue dozens of 'happy' memories of Yumi-san and her family, but so far they have all included her brother, Yuuki-kun. It's amazing how much she loved him and he her. There isn't a single memory of the two even arguing. He also seems to have been very protective of his sister. However, the first memory we want her to 'remember' is one without Yuuki-kun so that it will be less of a shock to her.

"So far we have tried to pull out her memories in a chronological order from her earliest memories as a small child. Maybe we need to skip ahead to try to find a specific memory? You said something about going shopping later, why don't we try to find a memory of her and her mother shopping by themselves?" he asked of the other two. With nods of approval from the others they finally began that day's session.

-oo-

Sachiko had never seen Yumi so giddy. The two were walking down the sidewalk on their way to a clothing store that Sachiko thought Yumi would accept was cheap enough to allow her to purchase some decent clothing. Yumi was practically skipping in happiness and the smile on her face was bright enough that most of the people around her smiled or grinned just to see the joyful child as she seemed to infect everyone around her. Sachiko found herself laughing and giggling at some of her petite soeur's antics, unable to find or even want some form of vaccination from Yumi's virus of good spirits.

Yumi was like this because she had remembered her mother's face. The hypnotherapy session had gone well enough that everyone had agreed that it was a memory that Yumi could "keep" for the first time. It had been of a time when she and her mother had gone out shopping for her very first set of kindergarten clothes. It had been just the two of them and they had spent the entire afternoon together. They had enjoyed lunch at a local McDonalds, Yumi's favorite eatery, before heading to the local mall. They had hit both of the big anchor stores, Sears and Macy's, as well as Gap for Kids and a couple of other boutique stores for kids clothing. They had tried on and picked out four dresses, two pairs of jeans, five t-shirts, and two new pairs of shoes along with a new 5-pack of Winnie-the-Pooh underwear. Yumi had especially liked the Tigger underpants and had laughed at the way he was shown bouncing on his tail, a great big toothless grin on his face.

Morioka-sensei had brought the memory to a close as the two returned to the car after sharing a couple of small Jamocha milkshakes from the mall Arby's. Everyone had agreed that it was the perfect memory to begin Yumi's remembrances of her happy childhood. Sachiko was sure that it was not an implanted memory because when they asked her to tell them about her mother Yumi's description had been too vivid and exactly matched the photographs Sachiko had of Yumi's real mother.

So it was no wonder that Yumi was literally floating on air as they passed various small specialty shops. Every so often Yumi would stop to window shop, usually at toy stores, kitchen utensil shops, or florists that also carried garden plants that could be planted either in the conservatory or as bedding flowers for the dorm's foundation.

When Sachiko looked to her side and found Yumi missing she assumed that she had stopped to window shop again. Turning around it took a moment of searching to find her petite soeur. When she found her Yumi was standing in front of another toy store window. The reason it had taken so long to spot her was because two tall boys were standing between her and Yumi about ten meters back. Yumi's back was to the store window and all signs of happiness had fled her features to be replaced by total fear.

They were probably just trying to pick her up, thinking that she was a cute girl alone. Sachiko didn't want to think badly of them, but they had no idea what their maybe innocent intentions were doing to the fragile girl. Before Sachiko could even take a step in their direction, the taller of the two boys did what was probably the absolute worst thing that he could have done. He grabbed Yumi by the arm to restrain her from running away. Just as Sachiko broke into a run a piercing scream filled the air, causing people everywhere to stop and turn in Yumi's direction.

The young girl's eyes were closed, her mouth open wide in one of the most strident screams of terror that Sachiko could ever believe would have emanated from the small girl. The boy immediately let Yumi go, hastily stepping back with his friend. As Sachiko rushed to her sister's side she actually heard the boy squeak in fear and tell his friend that they needed to get out of there. Sachiko didn't try to hold Yumi when she stopped next to the still screaming girl. She talked to her, lowly and slowly, trying to calm her and tell her she was safe; that nobody was going to hurt her. It did no good, Yumi continued to scream and scream until she suddenly stopped, her eyes flying wide open and her jaw clamping shut. It was similar to what had happened after her nightmare as Yumi's body became rigid for a moment, like a tonic seizure, before she collapsed to the pavement so quickly Sachiko had no time to try to catch her. If she had been a marionette it was like someone had simply cut her strings.

Sachiko dropped to her knees, fumbling in her pocket until she pulled out her cell phone and hit a speed dial button.

"Security," the other voice answered her calmly on the other end of the phone, "how may I help you Ojou-sama?"

"I need an ambulance at this location immediately," Sachiko nearly screamed into the phone.

"ETA two minutes, Ojou-sama," the voice said, still calm and confident, telling Sachiko without words that she needed to calm herself as well.

"Th-thank you," she said a bit more quietly. "Please contact Morioka-sensei and tell him to meet us at University Medical Center. He has privileges there."

"Of course, Ojou-sama."

"And call my father and tell him to meet me there as well," Sachiko sighed, as she held her limp sister in her arms, the distant wail of a siren coming closer and closer.

-oo-

It had been such an absolutely glorious day!

Classes had been fun, she had spent some time with her friends from the Yamayurikai – her onee-sama sitting next to her holding her hand under the table when she didn't need it to take notes – and then the wondrous session with Morioka-sensei and Ikeda-sensei.

Yumi was not a stupid girl. She had figured out after the second session that she was being treated with some form of hypnotherapy. But Sachiko seemed to trust the new doctor and she had to admit that there was something happening in her subconscious. The nightmares that had begun to become regular occurrences were proof enough that something was trying to break through even if it wasn't exactly what the doctors had been hoping for.

She had also easily seen through the polite farce that her onee-sama and Youko-sama had gone through to get her to offer to have Sachiko stay with her in hopes that her presence might help with the nightmares.

But today there had been real success. She had remembered the face, the voice, the laugh, and the touch of her mother! It was ecstasy! She couldn't remember a time in her life when she had ever been happier.

The shopping trip was also going well. She was able to be with her onee-sama, to hear her laughing and chuckling along with her. It had been a perfect day; until the two boys had stepped up behind her when she had stopped to look in a window at some board games that she thought the younger girls in the dorm would enjoy.

The first she knew of them was when the taller one spoke to her. She glanced up in the window to see the boy's reflections as they stood behind her.

"Hey, cutie. You alone today? Why not come have some fun with us?" the boy had asked with a charming smile. The reflections in the window had seemed to swirl as other faces, of boys and men, comingled with those of the two standing behind her. Where these two young men were smiling, the others seemed to be sneering or taunting, some raging at her. A fear unlike she had ever known before flashed through her.

"N-no, thank you," Yumi had stammered in reply, trying to hold herself together as she turned away from the window that was beginning to make her nauseous. "I . . . I'm here with a friend," she said softly, looking down at her feet.

"Hey, no problem, bring her along, the more the merrier," the shorter boy had responded with a low chuckle that sent a stab of pain through her brain as she seemed to remember another, similar chuckle that was much more sinister and her fear redoubled.

"N-no, we . . . we're shopping and need to get back," Yumi had stuttered again, desperately trying to find a way past the blockade of their bodies; her fight or flight response kicking in and telling her to get away as fast as she possibly could.

"Hey now, don't be like that, cute stuff," the taller boy had said as he grabbed her by the arm, trying to restrain her. She felt his fingers gently holding onto her bicep, but it seemed that another hand was gripping her tightly, the fingers digging in painfully, leaving large, deep bruises on her tiny body.

The boy's face had changed into that of another person, much uglier and meaner, an ugly grimace on his face as he seemed to be finding some form of release . . . and suddenly it had all flooded back to her.

The beatings, the rapes, the cutting and burning; being thrown against a wall and then into the dark, smelly room when she didn't do exactly what they wanted as quickly as they wanted it. The multiple gang rapes, all of them wanting her to "like it" or at least pretend as if she did. The multitude of large, angry dicks stuck in her tiny vagina, in her mouth, and in her anus. The slaps, punches, and worse. It all came back to her in one fleeting moment as the dam that had been so carefully built inside her mind to hold these nightmares at bay suddenly burst under tremendous pressure.

In her mind she heard the deafening sharp report of the gunshot that had taken her mother's life, and then the shot that had killed her father, and then she was gone. She was back there, in the past, watching as her mother and father were killed in front of her eyes, as her brother was yanked away from her and taken to another room, as the very first of more than a year's worth of daily rapes was perpetrated upon her tiny body.

It was too much, all too, too much. She could feel her body and mind shutting down. She could hear Sachiko over the screams that battered her ears, unable to recognize them as her own. The older girl tried to comfort and calm her, but it was far too late for that as she felt herself crumple to the ground.

And then she heard no more.

-oo-

"From what you tell me of the incident I think it's fairly obvious that all of her memories came back in a single rush," Morioka-sensei was telling the two people in the light green painted private hospital room. All three sets of eyes were focused on the fourth occupant of that room, looking so small and fragile in the large bed, an IV tube in her right arm while electrodes were attached to her chest and forehead. The other two in the room were Sachiko and Tooru Ogasawara, two members of what could easily be described as the most powerful family in Japan. Right now, however, they were simply a father and daughter, deeply concerned for the girl that was sister to another family member and meant so much to them.

"I've had this type of sudden deluge of memories happen in about three percent of my previous patients. I was really hoping that Yumi-chan would be part of the other ninety-seven percent," he sighed as he ran a hand through his sparse, greying hair. "I've given her a mild sedative along with an anti-anxiety medication to help her. My guess is that right now she is trying to sort through everything that happened to her from the time of her earliest memory to the day she was dropped off at the church."

"Does that mean that she has also recovered the pleasant memories of her childhood?" Tooru asked of the doctor, his eyes never leaving the silently weeping girl in the bed. Tears glistened on those deathly pale cheeks even though the eyes were gently closed and her chest rose and dipped in the slow breath of sleep.

"I believe that it does. There is no reason to think that only the memories of the death of her parents and her time in captivity with those . . . people have been released," the doctor answered.

"How long do you think the assimilation will take, Sensei?" Tooru asked as he squeezed his distraught daughter's hand as she wiped away yet another set of tears.

"It could take hours or days. It's hard to say which way Yumi-chan will go. All we can do is wait."

"Thank you, Sensei," Tooru said quietly as father and daughter moved to take seats on either side of the bed in which the girl that they both cared so much about lay, desperately fighting the demons in her own mind.

"I'm sorry, Otou-san," Sachiko sobbed quietly. "I thought things were going well. I had no idea . . ."

"There's nothing for you to be sorry about, Sachiko," Tooru told his daughter with a slight smile as he reached across Yumi's body to take hold of her hand again. "You did everything you could for Yumi-chan. There was no way that you could have foreseen the circumstances that led to what happened today, so don't beat yourself up about it."

Sachiko was going to reply when she felt another hand lay itself gently upon her own. She turned in shock to see Yumi had grasped her free hand where it had lain on the starched sheets. Her petite soeur's eyes were still closed, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she appeared to continue in her deep asleep. Even still she had reacted to Sachiko's pain, trying to give comfort to the older girl that she loved so dearly.

"See, Yumi-chan agrees," Tooru grinned.

"Yumi?" Sachiko whispered in surprise.

"She is probably somewhat lucid even now," the doctor said gently as he checked the machines that displayed her vital signs. "Her heartbeat is normal for a light sleep, but her brain wave activity is much higher than normal for a conscious person as a result of trying to sort through all the memories inundating her."

"Yumi, I'm here," Sachiko said gently as she held Yumi's hand, drawing tiny circles on the top with her thumb. "I'm here for you and I'm not going anywhere. I'll stay by your side as long as you need me to."

The brown haired girl's response was a slight squeeze to Sachiko's hand.

"You can sleep on the sofa or I can have a lounge chair brought in for your use, Ojou-sama," the doctor said with a slight smile as he watched the two young women. The love the two shared had been obvious to him from the start. "I'm sure that she will appreciate your desire to stay with her."

"The lounge chair will be fine," Sachiko told the doctor, never taking her eyes from her petite soeur.

-oo-

Tooru Ogasawara left with the doctor, giving his daughter a chaste kiss on the cheek and telling her that he would see her in the morning. It was getting late and time for Yumi to try to get some real sleep. Sachiko had stretched herself out on the lounge chair pulled up close to Yumi's bed, but a tug on the hand that was still clutched within her petite soeur's own did not require any measure of telepathy to tell her what it was that Yumi wanted.

Sachiko stood up again and pushed the chair up against the wall near the window. She then let down the guard rail on the bed and, after gently shifting Yumi's body to one side, climbed in next to her sister. The raven haired girl adjusted the pillow one of the orderlies had provided for her and lay on her left side, her right arm across Yumi's stomach while her left continued to hold Yumi's right hand tenderly. A soft smile briefly touched Yumi's lips before they opened in a small sigh and she seemed to drift off into a hopefully restful sleep.

It was only the second time that Sachiko had slept with Yumi and she would have thought that doing so in such a public place as a university hospital would have been horrifying for her honor, but she found she could have cared less just so long as she was with Yumi. The nurse that showed up a few minutes later never said a word to her as she went about checking and making note of Yumi's vital signs and switching the IV bag. She gave Sachiko a warm smile and softly wished her a goodnight before turning and heading back out the door. Sachiko returned the smile and as the door closed, in the last bit of light from the hallway, placed a soft kiss on Yumi's tear stained cheek.

The bright light of morning finally woke her slowly somewhere around eight o'clock. Sachiko had never been good in the mornings but for some reason waking next to Yumi found her much happier to face the day. When she finally opened her eyes it was to find Yumi's beautiful brown eyes looking at her with a love that went straight to her heart.

"Good morning, love," Sachiko whispered with a grin.

Yumi didn't respond, but a smile graced her lips and she tried to mouth a "good morning" to her grande soeur.

"Did you sleep well, Yumi?" Sachiko asked, happy that Yumi seemed to be awake but somewhat concerned that she didn't speak. Yumi used the index finger of her free left hand, her right hand still gently holding Sachiko's own, to make a swirling motion above her head.

"Oh, everything is still trying to find its rightful place?" Sachiko asked, unsurprised that her petite soeur was fully aware of what was happening. "You heard us last night? So you know about the hypnotherapy?" she asked quietly, a worried look entering her eyes, afraid Yumi would be angry at her for keeping it from her.

Yumi, however, just nodded and gave her another smile and squeezed her hand to show that she understood and held no grudges about the slight deceptions that had been perpetrated upon her.

"Thank you for forgiving me, Yumi," Sachiko sighed in relief, surprised at how much it meant to her to know that Yumi trusted her that much. "I only wanted what was best for you."

Yumi nodded and leaned over to give her a soft kiss on her nose. Why did Sachiko feel like pouting, wishing that she had instead placed those soft lips on her own? She shook it off as an unworthy question to be explored later, if at all. The kiss itself was enough of a delight.

"Can I get you anything, Yumi?" Sachiko asked, raising her head and shifting higher in the bed.

The pigtailed girl withdrew her hand from Sachiko's and used her right hand to mime writing on her left palm.

"A pad and pen?" Sachiko asked, still concerned with her petite soeur's lack of vocalization but willing to accept that her sister had a reason. Yumi nodded, but then also shook her head and made a motion of her hands indicating a much larger, square item. "A pad and pen and," Sachiko had to think for a moment before the light bulb went off in her head, "your sketchbook?"

Yumi grinned and nodded enthusiastically, clutching Sachiko's hand again and bringing it to her lips for another soft kiss.

A little tremor wound its way through the taller girl, like a spike of electricity, at the touch of those tender lips against her skin. _Later_, she thought to herself. _I'll think about this later._

"Is it in the art classroom?" At Yumi's nod Sachiko reached into her skirt pocket and dialed Youko-sama's cell and left her a voicemail regarding bringing Yumi's sketchpad, charcoal pencils and colored markers to the hospital when her grande soeur did not pick up immediately. She wasn't sure why her onee-sama had not picked up, but assumed that she was probably in the morning Yamayurikai meeting and didn't want to interrupt anyone. She then reluctantly let go of Yumi's hand and slipped out of bed to gather a pen and notepad from the nurse's desk, returning to Yumi's side as quickly as she could. When she saw Yumi's note, she immediately took her phone out again and, after only a moment's hesitation, called Sei's cell.

"Sachiko-chan!" Sei's ever ebullient voice answered the phone, "what can I do for you? Hey, why aren't you here? The meeting's been going on for over half an hour." Sachiko could hear her grande soeur's voice in the background demanding to know what was going on.

"Please tell my onee-sama that I tried her first but she wasn't answering. I need someone to do me a favor," Sachiko said quickly.

"What does our good Rosa Chinensis en Bouton need this early in the morning when she can't even find her way to school?" Sei chuckled.

"I need someone to go to the art department and get Yumi's sketchbook and drawing things and bring them to us," Sachiko explained.

"I can do that," Sei said, her voice dropping down as she became serious after hearing the tone of Sachiko's voice, "I brought the car today. Where are you Sachiko-chan?" she asked with a hint of concern now in her voice.

Sachiko sighed before she answered. "Yumi and I are at University Medical Center. There was . . . an incident yesterday. Yumi's fine, but all of her memories returned at once and we felt it better to have her here."

"Alright," Sei said slowly. She must have put her cell on speakerphone because the exclamations from the rest of the Yamayurikai were much more evident. "Hush, all of you," Sei commanded the others and, for probably the first time in Sachiko's memory, every voice stilled including that of her onee-sama. "Alright," the blonde said again, "I can do that. Can I ask why she needs her sketchbook? I assume from your tone that it's not to simply pass the time?"

"You're right, Sei-sama," Sachiko sighed again. "Yumi just asked me to contact the police. She has some people she wants to sketch for them."


	9. Chapter 9

I do not own MSGM or any of its characters. All such honors belong to Oyuki Konno. I will lay claim to the storyline.

* * *

><p>Yumi's hospital room became very crowded very quickly as the remaining six members of the Yamayurikai trooped in less than an hour later. After the many exclamations, hugs and wishes for Yumi to get well and return to them quickly the room became quiet. Sachiko made a comment regarding everyone cutting classes and suddenly showing up unannounced. She also questioned how Sei-sama managed to fit six girls including herself into her little Volkswagen New Beetle.<p>

"I swear that I heard an orgy going on in the back seat," Sei chuckled when asked about it, trying hard to keep things light as everyone stared at the small girl in the hospital gown. She had handed the sketchbook over to Yumi shortly after everyone entered the private hospital room. The explanation of what had happened the previous day required Sachiko to begin with a description of the first hypnotherapy session. She did not tell the other members of the Yamayurikai about Yumi's true past or her relationship with the Ogasawaras. That was for Yumi to decide once Sachiko had told her about Yuuki.

The slight smile that Yumi gave her never faltered as she told her tale, indicating that none of it was news to the pigtailed girl. It made her wonder how she had ever thought to keep it all from the highly intelligent first-year. She found that she was more embarrassed about that than about keeping it from her friends.

"I want to find those two bastards from yesterday and give them a good beat down," Sei fumed, stomping back and forth in the large private room. Yumi waved her hands in a negative motion and then quickly wrote a note on her pad.

[It's not their fault! I'm actually grateful to them. I now have all of the wonderful memories of my childhood back again!] The smile on her face gave the proof of her feelings.

"But your voice . . ." Yoshino asked with concern.

[I'm not worried. My mind is simply too busy sorting all of the memories to allow me to speak yet. I'm sure it will be better soon.]

"If you say so," Yoshino said with a frown, but she did not sound convinced.

Yumi gave her a grin that seemed to settle her down again although she started playing with her long braids, a sure sign that she was still upset.

"What are we waiting for?" Youko asked into the silence.

"I called my father," Sachiko explained. "He contacted the police and asked them to meet him in the lobby before coming up to the room."

"Oji-san is coming?" Youko replied with a grin. The two of them had gotten along well ever since Sachiko became her petite soeur. She then lost that smile as she remembered who was coming with him and why. "Yumi-chan, are you sure you really want to do this?" she asked the brown eyed girl. Yumi simply nodded and gave her a sad smile. "If you're sure," Youko sighed. "Just don't let them make you do something you don't want to."

[I'm the one that wants this], Yumi wrote. [I need to do this], she added to the pad.

They waited a few more minutes before Tooru knocked and entered the room followed by an older man in a dark grey suit with a long coat hanging over his arm. Tooru looked at all the girls sitting around the room and sighed before giving them all a smile.

"I can never fault you young ladies for your loyalty," he chuckled softly. He then turned to the young woman lying in the hospital bed. Yumi gave him a shy smile before flipping back a couple of pages in her pad and presenting it along with her hand.

[Good day, Ogasawara-sama. It is nice to finally meet you . . . at least awake].

Tooru had to chuckle. "So, you were somewhat awake last night. It's good to finally meet you as well, Yumi-san. Please call me Otou-san, if you don't mind. I almost feel like you are part of the family and not just my daughter's petite soeur."

[Thank you Otou-san], Yumi wrote and gave him a wide smile. She turned her eyes towards the other gentleman that had entered the room with Tooru.

"Yumi-chan, this is Senior Detective Nishihori. He is the head of the Organized Crime Bureau of the Tokyo Police. He's been handling the Yakuza, mafia, and other gang related crimes for the past twenty years." Tooru stopped for a moment and then, in a gentler voice said, "He was also the liaison between the Tokyo Police and the New Jersey State Police when you were kidnapped."

You could see Yumi gulp and her smile was a bit more forced, but still she held out her hand to greet the detective.

"Yasumi-san," he started to say but was immediately cut off by Yumi's strong head shake.

[Please call me Yumi, detective. It is the only name I have known for the past nine years; three years longer than anyone called me Yasumi].

"Then . . . Yumi-san, Ogasawara-san said that you asked for me. Something about sketches?" the detective asked.

Yumi nodded and then pointed to the vacant chair that Sachiko had pulled up next to her bed. As the detective sat she pulled out her sketch pad and charcoal pencils. Flipping to the first blank page, she glanced at the gray haired detective. At his nod, she closed her eyes.

When her eyes opened again they were totally unfocused; as if she was seeing something that none of the others could. Her right hand began moving without her even glancing at the sketch pad.

Sachiko had never seen Yumi draw. She had seen a few of her paintings and sketches, but this was the first time to see her actually creating her wondrous art. Although Yumi had not said a word as to what it was she was going to do, Sachiko already had a good idea. As the young artist's creation was born, everyone else in the room slowly congregated around her bed.

It quickly became evident that Yumi was drawing the portrait of a young man with black hair, a wide nose, smallish ears laid close to his head, and a sneer to his lips that promised pain beyond compare. The detective opened his mouth to say something but Yumi quickly held up her hand to stop him before continuing with her work.

"I believe she wants you to withhold comment until she is finished, detective," Sachiko said quietly, not wanting to disturb either Yumi or the stillness of the room. Yumi's quick nod was all she needed to confirm her assumption and the detective sat back with a frown.

Yumi quickly finished the portrait and then wrote something underneath.

[Jimmy Chu. Murdered my parents. Kidnapping. Rape. Torture. Paramus, NJ and Tokyo, Japan]. She flipped the page and began another portrait; this one of a man with long blonde hair.

[Kuro Goto. Accessory to murder. Rape. Torture. Paramus, NJ and Tokyo, Japan]. She flipped the page.

Another blonde haired man. [Jake Gunderson. Accessory to murder. Rape. Paramus, NJ].

Another dark haired man. [Ichi Chano. Rape and torture. Tokyo, Japan].

The list went on and on, each name and portrait gouging out another piece of Sachiko's heart. Each one identified as either rape, torture or both. Tears were evident in almost every eye in the room except for the detective. Even her father was wiping his eyes occasionally. On the next few pages she began drawing smaller portraits, over twenty of them, each about 10cm x 10cm. There were no names under these portraits, but under each she wrote [Rape. Tokyo, Japan].

The final portrait was of a young, skinny girl with obviously dyed blonde hair.

[Keiko Chikamoto. She saved me!].

Yumi's eyes lost their unfocused look and she carefully put the now much smaller charcoal pencil on the top of her hospital table. She then put her hands over her eyes as she started to cry silently. Sachiko pulled her petite soeur into her arms as Yumi wept into her breast, her arms clutched tightly around Sachiko's waist.

The detective gently pulled the now almost complete sketchbook from between the two of them to protect it, and the precious evidence it contained, from being crumpled.

By the time Yumi's tears and dried up and she was once again sitting up in her bed, Detective Nishihori had looked through the portraits again and made notes in his own notepad.

"I now understand why you didn't want me to say anything, Yumi-san. You didn't want what I might say to guide you in your identification of these suspects."

"SUSPECTS!" screamed from five of the six mouths of the members of the Yamayurikai. Only Shimako kept to herself, but Yumi could see her almost biting her nails wanting to be just as demonstrably outraged as the rest of them.

"Yes, suspects. That's what I have to call them until they are actually convicted," the detective explained in a patient manner, "at least those of them that are still alive."

Starting with the pages of smaller portraits, he identified most of them as members of the Kanagawa Protection League, a small time gang that got busted up about five years ago; almost every one of the members killed by a rival gang. "All but one of these guys is dead except for this one," he said, pointing to one portrait, "who is serving three non-consecutive life sentences for murder.

"Most of these others are also dead of one thing or another," he continued until he came to the first few individual portraits. "Now we come to the major players. Jimmy Chu is a scumbag that immigrated from Shanghai and wormed his way into the lower levels of the Yakuza. About ten years ago it was rumored he had decided to enter into the slave trades. He's moved up in the organization, but no one's been able to pin anything on him. We've tried to raid his hideout multiple times. Nothing's ever been found.

"Goto and Chano are his two main lieutenants. We know both are up to their armpits in racketeering, slavery, gambling, and murder, but again we've never been able to prove anything. Every time we try to catch them in the act there's been nothing." He growled under his breath, allowing the anger and hatred he had for the situation show. "Jake Gunderson is probably Chu's contact in the states. We know Jimmy gets shipments in from the US every so often, but again . . ." he didn't need to finish the statement. No evidence.

"Finally, I'm sorry to say, Yumi-san, the body of Keiko Chikamoto was found in a drainage ditch just over nine years ago. It looked like she had been used as an example for others to not cross Chu."

Yumi nodded, wiping tears from her eyes as she grabbed her pad and pen again.

[I had a feeling she was probably dead. Probably as a result of letting me escape].

"Probably," the detective said softly. There was no way to lessen the pain of the young girl lying before him. He then flipped back to the first of the multi-portrait pages. A shaking finger pointed at one picture of an older man with dark hair and a mustache under which was written the word "rape."

"Then, there's this guy," he said in a strained, venomous voice, the whiteness of his knuckles in his fisted left hand that he pounded against his own leg evidence of his fury. "This is Detective Sergeant Tanouye of the Organized Crime Bureau. He works for _me_," he fumed. "Now I know why we've never been able to lay a hand on these guys. He's been tipping them off on every raid and movement we've made!" he cursed. "But that doesn't tell us where Chu holds his captives."

Yumi reached out and gently took the sketchbook from the detective and flipped to a blank page. Her eyes once again lost focus as she began sketching. This time it was not a portrait, but a picture of the inside of what seemed to be a warehouse.

"That's the inside of Jimmy's headquarters," the detective said in awe as the picture formed in front of his eyes. Yumi circled a particular section of one corrugated steel wall and then started another picture, an enlargement of that section. It looked just like a normal corrugated steel wall until she began drawing horizontal lines and darkening two vertical lines. When she had finished she began almost frantically writing underneath the enlarged picture.

[Fake section of wall. Single piece of sheet metal held on by magnets located behind the original wall so as to be almost invisible. Girls held in a dark, wet room behind a second locked steel door].

"You've got to be kidding me!" Detective Nishihori exclaimed, grabbing the sketchbook from Yumi's hands and staring at the picture. "I can't believe it!"

Yumi made shooing gestures with her hands.

"Yeah. Yeah. Sorry Ogasawara-sama. I've got to go," he said as he quickly gathered his things.

Yumi grabbed the sketchbook from him and, before he could start yelling, signed and printed her name, the date and the time, and then handed it back to him. Again she shooed him away, a desperate look on her face.

"Don't worry, Yumi-sama," the detective said before he rushed out the door, "if anyone's there, we'll save them this time!"

Yumi nodded, a weak smile on her lips as the door closed behind him.

Eight pairs of wide eyes, along with eight gaping mouths, stared at the tiny girl lying in the hospital bed, unable to believe what they had just witnessed.

Yumi looked around her at the shocked people surrounding her bed.

"What?" she asked in confusion.

-oo-

Later that afternoon Yumi was sitting on the edge of her bed preparing to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth after eating her lunch. As she was putting on her slippers she heard a knock on her door and Sachiko walked in with a compressed smile. School had let out less than an hour ago so Yumi knew that Sachiko had skipped her classes as well as the Yamayurikai meeting. Tooru followed his daughter into the room and the two stood quietly a moment, side-by-side, before Sachiko opened her mouth.

"Yumi . . ." she hesitated a moment, unsure of herself which was a side of Sachiko that Yumi almost never saw. "There's . . . there's someone you need to meet. He's my brother. I know I have not told you about him before, but I wanted . . . no, you _need_ to meet him," she said guiltily.

Yumi wasn't exactly sure what was going on, but she had an inkling that it wasn't something that she really wanted to know.

"Alright, onee-sama," she replied with a slight frown, trusting in Sachiko.

Tooru went to the door and opened it, motioning down the hall, calling someone towards him.

A young man in the dark grey uniform of Hanadera Boy's Academy entered slowly, almost timidly. For a moment Yumi was sure she must be looking at some sort of funhouse mirror, because except for his clothes and hairstyle she could have been looking in the full length mirror in the bathroom of her dorm.

She put her foot down to the floor and slowly stood. She could see pain and fear in those soft brown eyes as the young man's mouth worked to say her name but nothing came out. But mostly what she saw in those eyes was an unending, unfathomable guilt that he had been harboring for so very, very long. She took a step forward, and then another, until she was just an arm's reach from the boy. She raised her left hand, cupped slightly, and slowly moved as if to cup his cheek tenderly.

Everyone in the room was so focused on her left hand that they never saw the fisted roundhouse of her right until it connected solidly with the boy's chin and sent him flying to the floor. Before anyone could move or even react to what she had done she dropped to her knees in front of the young man and gently took his face between her two hands.

"YUMI!" Sachiko finally found her voice as both she and her father made to move towards the pair on the floor. The look that Yumi shot them not only stopped them in their tracks but pushed them each back a step. Sachiko had never seen such a commanding look on her petite soeur's face before and it literally frightened both her and her father into immobility.

Yumi looked back down at the boy lying on the floor, tears flooding his cheeks and quiet sobs heaving his chest. If it was one thing she had learned in the dorm it was that children that feel they have done something wrong also feel, deep down, that they need to be punished for those wrongs. Only then could they begin to feel better about themselves once again; only then could the healing start. She had seen that need in this young man's eyes.

"Yuuki," Yumi said softly, a gentle and loving smile on her lips. "That is all the punishment you will ever need for what happened nine years ago. You were six years old. You were all of maybe four feet tall and barely forty pounds. They were three adult men with guns. They were bigger than you, outweighed you, and would have shot you without hesitation if you had tried to come to my rescue." She was speaking slowly and carefully, putting every ounce of love she could in her voice as she spoke to the brother she had not seen since the night of her abduction. "You have no need to feel guilty over what happened. Neither Mother nor Father could do anything. What could a six year old boy do that they couldn't? I'm just glad that you're alive. So . . . whatever you were thinking, whatever you did or did not do . . . I forgive you and just thank God that you are here with me now."

Yuuki's tears and crying throughout her talk had slowly dried up and he stared at her in awe as he realized that she was forgiving him. The shock of her words turned slowly to acceptance as she spoke so calmly to him and she could see a light flickering of understanding enter those soft brown eyes.

"You're my brother," she said quietly as she pulled him up to his knees, "and I love you."

"I – I love you too, Yas – Yumi-san," he wept as she put her arms around him and pulled him into her embrace. His arms went around her waist and he held on so tightly that she thought he would never let go.

They cried in each other's arms until there were no more tears to be wept between the two of them. They sat back slowly from each other, their arms not wanting to let go. Smiles graced their lips now rather than sobs. Yumi turned to look at Tooru and Sachiko, a wide grin on her face.

"Thank you onee-sama, Otou-san. Thank you so much for giving my brother back to me." A look crossed the pigtailed girls face then, as she was struck by remembrance of Sachiko's words just before Yuuki had entered the room. "Y-your brother?" she stammered as she stared at her onee-sama.

Sachiko nodded. She moved slowly over to where Yuuki and an extremely confused Yumi sat and got down on the floor with them. She put her left arm around her petite soeur while her right hand gently stroked Yuuki's hair.

"Yes, Yumi. Yuuki-kun is my brother. After your parents were . . ."

"Murdered," Yumi finished the statement for her.

"Yes, murdered," Sachiko sighed, "Yuuki-kun came to live with us. Your father and my father were very good friends in college and even afterwards. It was part of your parent's will that, if anything happened to them, Otou-san would take care of you and Yuuki-kun. Otou-san and Okaa-san adopted Yuuki shortly after he came to us, but we could never find you no matter how hard we looked."

Tooru knelt down next to the trio and placed a loving hand on Yumi's shoulder.

"And I would do the same for you in a heartbeat, Yumi-chan," he said with a smile. "I would love for you to become a part of our family, but it's your choice. You're old enough to figure out what it is that you want and to make your own decisions."

"Otou-san!" Sachiko gasped.

"This has to be Yumi-chan's choice," Tooru calmly explained to his daughter. "I truly want Yumi-chan to be a part of our family, but it's up to her. We can't force her."

Sachiko glared at him for a moment before lowering her eyes and accepting his words with a nod. As much as she wanted Yumi to always be by her side she understood that it had to be the younger girl's decision.

"Would . . . would you mind if I thought about it for a while," Yumi asked softly. "It's not something I can answer on the spur of the moment."

"I understand, Yumi-chan," Tooru replied with a smile. "Take all the time you need."

"Thank you," Yumi smiled. "Would you all mind if I took a walk. So much has happened, I think I need to be alone for a little while."

"Of course, Yumi," Sachiko said with a knowing smile as she stood up. Yuuki and Tooru stood as well. Yuuki handed his sister to her feet and the two embraced again before Yumi quietly left the room and turned down the hall, allowing her feet to take her where they would as she tried to think about what it was she really wanted.

She didn't know how long she walked, but she eventually stopped before a set of light colored, wooden double doors. Looking above the lintel she saw the word "Chapel." It seemed to be the appropriate place for her, so she quietly opened the doors and slipped inside.

She genuflected before the alter, even though there was no hanging rood, and made her way to a small niche in the left wall where she saw a very familiar figure. She knelt before the icon of Maria-sama and put her hands together, lowering her head in prayer.

"Maria-sama, I'm not sure what to do. So much has happened in such a short time. For so long I've been on my own, with only the Sister's and the other girls at the dorm to help me find my way. Now I have an onee-sama, a girl that I love deeply, sometimes maybe more than as a sister," she finally admitted to herself. "I have my memories back, and I have found my brother after so long. And I have been offered a place in a real family. I know that they wouldn't be my real Mother and Father, but to have parents again, and a sister and brother . . .

"But is that what I really want? Do I want to be onee-sama's . . . do I really want to be Sachiko-sama's sister? The feelings that I have for her, to want to be by her side for the rest of my life, to want to be with her until the end of time, is this the love of a sister? I want to hold her hand. I want to touch her and . . . and kiss her," she gasped at the realization. "Are these the thoughts and feelings I should be having towards my sister? I doubt that she has the same feelings for me, but do I really want to take the chance of losing out on the possibility of a real love? Do I have to choose between the two: a family or a lover? Is there no other way? No other option?" she wept.

"Please, Maria-sama, you have always been there to guide me in my times of need. Please, just this one more time, please help me to see the path I should take."

"You know, Yumi-chan, it doesn't have to be one or the other," she heard a deep and loving voice behind her.

She whipped around to see Tooru sitting on a pew behind her and her breath caught in her throat at all she had revealed to him. But instead of a frown, instead of anger and disgust, she saw love and a soft, tender smile.

"I would be quite happy to simply enter you into our family register," he told her as she sat there on her knees, dumbfounded. "I don't have to say exactly in what roll you are a part of our family. Whether as my daughter or . . . or in some other, undefined roll." Tooru held out his hand to Yumi and pulled her up to sit beside him.

"Would you . . . could you really do that Otou-san?" Yumi asked quietly, her eyes on her fingers clasped within the older man's strong hand. "I don't know how Sachiko-sama feels about me, but I really don't want to take a chance of losing what we might have together if I become her sister in truth."

"I'm not sure that she knows herself how she feels about you, Yumi-chan," Tooru told her honestly, "but I know that she feels more for you than a simple sisterly love. Like you, she wants to have you by her side for the rest of her life. She loves you dearly, and much more than as a sister, I just don't know that she has awakened to it yet."

"If . . . if there is a possibility, any possibility, that we might be more than sisters to each other, I don't want to give up that chance, Otou-san," Yumi said quietly but with a force of conviction that surprised even herself. "I love her."

Tooru sat silent for a moment, gazing at this wonderful, sweet girl that he would dearly love to have in his life.

"You know, Yumi-chan, we will always be your family, whether we ever make it formal or not we will always be there for you. But if you have a chance at real love, if it were me, I would do whatever it takes to make that love become a reality."

He squeezed her hand and then gently released her and stood up.

"As I said, it's your decision, but you need to ask yourself, what does my heart tell me? What do I really want? What role do I want to play in Sachiko's life? Do you want to be her sister? Or do you want to be more? Think about it," he said with a smile as he left her to her thoughts, hoping that he had in some way helped not only Yumi-chan, but Sachiko as well.

"What I want?" Yumi murmured to herself. "What I want?" A smile creased her lips as her eyes sparkled with renewed joy.

"What I want is . . ."

-oo-

Epilogue

Yumi sat back in the verdigris colored wrought iron chair and gazed up at the myriad stars that shown down on the city of Musashino and the small, grey stone dorm behind the Chapel at Lillian Girls' Academy. The glass panes of the conservatory at the rear of the dormitory had been cleaned over the weekend so no grit or grime remained to dim the light of those miraculous stars. As usual she had left the conservatory's lights off so as to better see and appreciate one of God's greatest gifts to man.

A cup of jasmine tea was held in her right hand while a sweet apple fruit tart sat as yet untouched on a napkin on the table. She knew that the tart, one of many baked earlier in the evening by Sister Agatha, was a result the good Sister's simple joy of baking rather than for any other reason.

It had been months since Yumi had seen any concern or worry in the young woman's eyes, and she was happy that even then it had not been for her, but for one of the younger girls in the dorm. The ten year old had been upset at having received a 90 on her art project rather than the 95 or 100 she had been hoping for. Yumi had taken the girl aside and pointed out the slight imperfections in the stoneware cup that, with a little more care and attention to detail, could have been smoothed over before final glazing and firing in the kiln. The youngster's eyes had widened in understanding and a grin had blossomed upon her lips as she realized what had gone wrong and what she could do to not make the same mistake next time. With a kiss to Yumi's cheek, the girl had retrieved her cup and happily skipped off to her room. Much to Yumi's embarrassment, Sister Agatha had kissed her other cheek in quiet thanks.

The ten year old was one of the five girls rescued by Senior Detective Nishihori when he and his forces had raided Jimmy Chu's Tokyo hideout. Jimmy, his two lieutenants, Goto and Chano, and most of the rest of the gang had been killed when Jimmy had decided to shoot it out with police rather than take his chances with the Japanese courts. Jake Gunderson, Jimmy's contact and partner in the US, had been arrested by the State Police at the Port Jersey docks as he was attempting to ship another three girls from the US to Japan in a small container just big enough for the kids and barely sufficient rations for the long voyage by container ship. The information provided by Yumi, scant as it was, had allowed authorities to exterminate two gangs of slave traders in the US and Japan. Finally, it seemed that Detective Sergeant Tanouye had met with some sort of fatal accident while locked up and awaiting trial.

The pretty ten year old girl still awoke from nightmares every so often, but with the love and friendship of Sister Agatha and the rest of the girls in the dorm she seemed to be slowly adjusting to her new life at Lillian.

Yumi took a sip of her tea and sighed contentedly. She had left her hair free of their customary pigtails so as to dry better after her evening shower. She closed her eyes to enjoy the peace and quiet of the indoor garden, the silence broken only by the soft tinkling of a small waterfall across the room. The sound of the door opening and closing did not pull her from her tranquility, nor did the swish of a silken robe as it grazed leafy fronds.

Only the feel of soft, warm lips upon her own was able to rouse her.

"Good evening, onee-sama," she said lovingly, licking her lips to savor the sweetness of the kiss.

"Good evening, Yumi," came Sachiko's smiling voice in return before placing another tender kiss upon the ripe, pink lips of her love. "You haven't eaten your tart yet?"

"I was waiting for you, Sachi," Yumi grinned, reaching to put her hands behind that slender, graceful neck and pulling her love down into yet another kiss, this one slightly more passionate than the previous two. "I'm glad that you had the time to come spend the night, love," she said with a smile once the kiss had, at least temporarily, been breathily suspended.

"I didn't give Otou-san the choice," Sachiko grinned as she took a seat at the table, placing her own cup of jasmine tea down so that she could reach across to take hold of Yumi's outstretched hand. "Not to say that he really argued. You know he loves you so much and wants only happiness for the two of us."

"I do know that, and I'm grateful with how supportive he has been of our relationship."

"You mean in how he pushed the two of us together," Sachiko laughed. "I swear he missed his calling as a matchmaker."

"Don't tell that to Grandfather," Yumi grinned, thinking of the aged patriarch of the Ogasawara clan. When told of their love for each other, the old man had simply grinned and given his blessings. He never could say no to his granddaughter. He had also been more than happy to welcome his "Granddaughter-in-whatever" as he liked to call Yumi.

Looking around the night draped conservatory, Sachiko could tell why it was that Yumi was still reluctant to move out to the estate. With everything she had here, as well as all of the girls she still loved to take care of, she knew it was going to take an act of God to get her to leave. She did visit fairly often to get reaquainted with her brother and the rest of her new found family. They had talked about it before, and one of Yumi's main arguments against moving in had been that she didn't think it proper for two lovers to be living together under the same roof until they could be officially joined together in marriage. Yumi still harbored some small hopes that the Japanese Government would change the laws to allow for same gender marriages, but she wasn't willing to wait forever. They had promised themselves that if they still could not be legally married by the time they had both graduated from college then Yumi would allow Tooru to enter her into the Ogasawara family register as "Other."

Until that time, they would simply be girlfriends.

"Well, if you don't eat that tart soon we won't be able to get to bed," Sachiko teased, a sexy purr in her voice that promised certain things to the younger girl as soon as they got under the covers of the double bed now situated in Yumi's dorm room.

Yumi quickly grabbed the apple tart and downed it in four bites as Sachiko looked on laughing.

The two walked back into the dorm hand-in-hand, heading towards the room and bed that they occasionally shared.

Katsura-san watched them go up the stairs together from her seat in the common room. She sighed and got up from her chair to get herself another cup of tea. She figured that it would be at least another hour or so before the room across the hall from her own would quiet down enough for her to finally get some sleep.

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><p>AN: Thank you all for once again allowing me into your lives. I hope that I have been able to entertain you. Feel free to review/comment/PM me at any time.

As always, please take care of yourselves,

CX


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